In short, Alex was a nerd, and, just like at school, there was no hiding it. But at least at his school in the city, it wasn’t weird to be poor. There were plenty of kids there worse off than he was. But at camp, he had the double whammy of being the poor kid and the nerd.
So why the hell, he asked himself, filling a gallon jug with maple syrup, did he keep coming back?
The doors opened, and the first wave of boys came shuffling in, most of them yawning and wiping sleep from their eyes. He scanned the group for one who wouldn’t be. One who, like him, had risen before dawn.
One whose very existence answered the question of why Alex kept coming back to camp.
“Hey, Alex.”
Cary Bell. Alex arranged his features into what he hoped was a neutral expression and tried not to be too obvious about checking out his friend. Cary’s dark-brown ponytail was still damp from the exertion of his morning run. His skin was a beautiful, flawless expanse that Alex fantasized about touching—unlike the rest of them, teenage acne seemed to have bypassed Cary. And when Cary smiled, which he did often and easily, it lit up his whole face in a way that never failed to make Alex’s heart twist. Alex often had to force himself to stop looking at Cary’s full, pink lips. His eyes just kept going there.
“Good run this morning?” he asked, digging around in the serving tray for the best-looking pancakes to transfer to Cary’s plate. Cary was a cross-country superstar at his school—he’d won the provincial championship in his distance category last year, in fact. So he had special permission to go for early morning runs since he was preparing for the fall season. That meant he was always among the first people into the dining hall.
“Nope,” Cary said, still smiling. “My time was crap today. I think last night’s s’mores are still sitting in my belly.”
“Oh, so you probably don’t want these, then,” Alex teased, pretending he was going to take back Cary’s pancakes with his tongs.
“No way!” Cary protested, lunging.
Alex let himself be caught. Worked on keeping his breath even as Cary’s hand made contact with his bare forearm, sending almost painful jolts of electricity shooting all the way up to his shoulder.
“I’m starving,” Cary said, waiting a beat before removing his hand from Alex’s arm.
“You’re always starving.”
It was true, and it wasn’t surprising considering how active Cary was. In addition to the running, he played baseball in the spring. A natural athlete, he won most of the events in the camp’s “Blue Games,” both land-based and water-based. But he wasn’t one of those jocks who couldn’t talk about anything besides sports. There was something about the way Cary moved through the world, with such a sense of ease, that was universally compelling. It bordered on entitlement, and perhaps it would have been less palatable if he’d been less of a nice guy. But that was the thing about Cary Bell. On top of all his talents, he was a nice guy.
“Bell, you wanna cut short this marathon convo with Kitchen Boy here and move it along?”
Alex jerked his arm back from where it had remained extended long after Cary had stopped touching him. He was getting sloppy, which was dangerous. Because although Cary Bell was a nice guy, his friend Brooks Martin III was not.
Cary shot Alex an apologetic look. “See you at programming later?”
Alex nodded, chastened. He needed to be more careful. If Brooks and the rest of the guys in their year knew that Cary was the reason Alex came to camp, they would crucify him. Alex knew the drill. This wasn’t his downtown school, with its gay-straight alliance and its obviously gay science teacher who always made a point of telling Alex he could talk to him about anything. Nope, here, you shared a cabin with seven other guys, most of them rich, arrogant jerks just looking for a reason to fuck with you. So if the guys talked about the girls at the neighboring camp, you smiled and agreed with their assessments of who was hot and who was not. You kept your eyes unwaveringly on the floor in the communal showers.
Alex wasn’t exactly out and proud at school—he hadn’t had that “talk” with his science teacher—but his mom and his close friends knew about him. He was out enough. But it couldn’t be like that here. At Camp Blue Lake, you kept certain parts of yourself private. You took the gay part of yourself and shoved it way down inside. It was a matter of survival.
But in past summers, his feelings for Cary hadn’t been so overtly sexual. When they were younger, they just clicked. As friends. Cary was easy to talk to, shared lots of Alex’s “nerdy” interests. They read the same books and traded them back and forth all summer. They didn’t share the same taste in music, Cary favoring metal that sounded like noise to Alex. But he liked that, because it gave them something to spar about. Whether they were agreeing about books or bickering about music, it was easy to be with Cary. Being around Cary made Alex feel good about himself. Hell, being around him made Alex feel invincible. It was like there was a force field around Cary inexorably pulling Alex in. So he kept coming back to camp, despite all the shit that came with it.
Except this summer, there was something else happening, too. A casual touch, like with the pancakes just then, practically made him pass out. He replayed each conversation, every glance, in his head before he fell asleep at night. When Cary lent him a book, he obsessed over the idea that his hands were touching pages that Cary had also touched. He wasn’t sure why everything felt so much more intense that summer. The force field was still there, but it felt orders of magnitude more dangerous, like a black hole whose orbit he couldn’t escape if he tried. His senses were full of Cary. Everywhere he turned, there he was. Dressing in the dim light of dawn to go for a run. Lying on the floating dock in the lake, letting the sun dry his drenched skin, a golden Adonis. Sluicing through the water in his canoe, biceps bunching, as if he and the boat were one creature. Sometimes Alex feared he was going to have to go through the whole summer with a half-woody. And there was no relief, no way to take the edge off. Cary slept on the bunk above him, so unless he managed to hit the showers at a time when he was alone—which was rare—he was just shit out of luck.
Yes, Alex came back to camp every summer to be with Cary Bell. But, somehow, this summer, being with Cary Bell had become indistinguishable from wanting Cary Bell.
Chapter Four
When Cary arrived at the annual Women in Finance Awards on Friday evening, it was to find that Alex had changed his tactics.
Alex had a reputation for being ruthless. When something wasn’t working business-wise, he jettisoned it. Or, if you could believe the recent profile of him in Report on Business magazine, if “it” was a person, he simply fired “it.” He was unrelenting in pursuit of his goals, everyone said, utterly unsentimental.
So when Cary strolled into the ballroom at the Four Seasons and saw his name listed as being at the same table as Alex, he could only conclude that Alex had abandoned his longstanding commitment to avoiding Cary at these things. In fact, Cary had to wonder if Alex had engineered it so they were seated at the same table, because he would have thought Dominion Bank would have purchased a whole table. The event was high profile, and everyone in the finance world came out to see and be seen, so Cary had to attend. But he’d only purchased a single ticket. Other than his three measly employees, he was Bell capital.
Alex was deep in conversation with the woman seated next to him when Cary arrived at the table. It was about half full—the event wasn’t set to begin for another fifteen minutes. Cary walked around the table looking for the place card bearing his name. At precisely the moment he realized he was not only at Alex’s table, but seated right next to him, the man in question looked up from his conversation, finding Cary’s gaze immediately.
“Cary,” he said, his voice totally devoid of inflection.
There was a slight pause while Cary waited for something else. An insincere “nice to see you,” maybe, or a “have you met X?” But there was nothing. Just that blank expression and bland recitation of Cary’s name.
/> All right. If that’s how it was going to be, two could play this game. He just had to figure out the new rules. “Alex,” Cary said, flattening his tone to match Alex’s.
“It’s Alexander,” Alex said calmly, as if correcting a child’s pronunciation.
The rest of the table had grown silent. This would be the appropriate time for Cary to greet the few people he knew and introduce himself to the rest, but he seemed to be having a staring contest with Alex—Cary couldn’t think of him as Alexander—and he wasn’t about to cede it. Nor was Alex, apparently, who gazed at him dispassionately.
The arrival of an emcee at the head table was what finally did it. As if by silent truce, they both turned their attention to the front of the room, joining in the applause when the emcee introduced the first award recipient. But Cary was still intensely aware of Alex. Sitting next to him reminded Cary of the way they used to walk side by side down the trails at camp, which had been too narrow for two teenaged guys. But Cary hadn’t cared, had crowded into Alex’s space anyway, craving the “accidental” brush of arm against arm. Today, those arms were swathed in shirts and suit coats, but that didn’t make the proximity any less potent. In fact, Alex’s arms might as well have been bare because his black suit and skinny black tie, which made him look like a freaking Armani model, were not having a dampening effect at all. It wouldn’t take much to imagine that suit crumpled on the floor. Cary shifted in his seat as the audience laughed at a joke the first speaker made.
Cary still remembered the surprising softness of Alex’s lips. That single kiss had stayed with him. Sometimes he feared it had marked him somehow, because although he’d had plenty of great sex, he’d never been able to recapture that butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling Alex had given him at camp. He would try, and sure, the first rush of a new relationship was always fun, but ultimately, he could never make himself stay interested for very long. Hell, that summer of crushing on Alex had, in some ways, been his longest relationship.
He wondered if Alex’s lips would still be as gentle as they had been back then. Somehow, he thought not.
Cary’s reverie was interrupted by another round of applause and a server bearing the first course. Alex moved slightly closer to Cary as if to make room for her to place a salad in front of the woman seated on his other side, but just as Cary was about to move, too, to keep a consistent amount of distance between them, Alex leaned in even more, his lips so close to Cary’s ear that he could feel the heat of the other man’s breath.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” he whispered.
It was like a jackhammer had taken up residence in Cary’s chest in place of his heart and someone had just flipped the lever to turn it on. “Oh?” he said, raising his eyebrows and praying that Alex, who hadn’t withdrawn even an inch, wouldn’t see the frantic pounding of his pulse in his throat.
“I don’t think you should drop out of the competition for the Liu account.”
Well, this was an unexpected development. But what had he thought? That Alex had been thinking of him in any other way? Of course he hadn’t.
“Because what fun would that be, really?” Alex continued. “Winning by forfeit wouldn’t be nearly as much fun as watching you jump through all those hoops and then destroying you.”
Cary sucked in a breath. How had he been wondering if Alex’s kiss would still be gentle? Because there was nothing gentle about this man. He was all hard edges and cruel games. Any kindness the boy had possessed had been burnt off, a casualty of Alex’s meteoric rise to wealth and power. Cary had spent twenty years feeling guilty about publicly repudiating Alex so badly at camp. But he could see now that hanging on to that guilt was allowing himself too much agency in the extraordinary story of Alex’s ascent. Alex had always been tremendously capable, so Cary needed to get over himself and stop beating himself up over something that happened so long ago.
More importantly, he needed to stay in the freaking game. Hadn’t his uncle always berated him for not being ruthless enough, for getting too invested in the life stories of his clients? He had always protested that success in their field didn’t preclude understanding the lives behind their clients’ financial goals, but maybe his uncle was onto something. Alex Evangelista, the most successful person in the room tonight, sure as hell wasn’t getting side-tracked because of feelings.
All right. Time to stop cowering before the alpha dog. Alex could huff and puff all he liked, but he needed to know that his intimidation tactics weren’t going to work. So Cary affected an unimpressed look and murmured a non-committal, “We’ll see.”
Alex jerked his head away so hard, Cary was surprised he didn’t give himself whiplash. Just like earlier in the week outside Liu’s place, Alex seemed enraged by Cary’s show of nonchalance. Something to note for the future. He signaled a server. “May I have another glass of wine, please?” He could give a shit about another glass of wine, but he wanted Alex to know he was dismissed. Cary was done being sentimental. He couldn’t afford sentimentality, unless he wanted to go crawling back to his uncle. He’d always been an athlete. He knew how to turn off his emotions and play a game. So that was the key, to think of this as a game. He was in it to win it now.
For the rest of the dinner, Cary’s senses were heightened, stretched taut by sitting calmly next to a man whose rage was barely contained. Alex was like a tiger pacing in a too-small cage, and Cary was hyper alert to every move the wild beast made. The movement of his Adam’s apple when he swallowed, the swish of his napkin when he moved it from his lap to his plate after the final course. The glance Alex shot at him, so quick it would have gone unnoticed if Cary hadn’t been on such high alert, before shoving his chair back and leaving in the middle of the last speech.
Was he coming back? It was impossible to know. It was a warm May evening and Cary hadn’t worn a coat over his suit, so probably Alex hadn’t, either. A quick glance at the floor showed no bag, nothing to indicate Alex would return.
Cary grabbed his briefcase and slid his chair back. He wasn’t going to let Alex’s last impression of him reinforce the charge Alex had previously laid, that Cary was an immature, untried kid who didn’t take things seriously enough.
And, more important than that, Cary was not losing the Liu account. He’d gone into it thinking it was a great opportunity, but a long shot. Now? Alex would have to pry that account from his cold, dead fingers.
…
Coming to a stop in the lobby of the hotel, Alexander pulled out his phone and fired off a text to Sara, whom he’d been sitting next to inside the ballroom, telling her something had come up that required his immediate attention.
It wasn’t a lie.
Alexander had been expecting war. War, he could do. That’s why he’d taken the pre-emptive move of having his assistant call ahead to arrange things so Cary was seated next to him at the gala. Stun and disarm—that had been his plan. A time-tested tactic of war.
He had been prepared for war. He hadn’t been prepared for indifference. The way Cary kept responding to his trash talk with calm, almost amused dismissals had Alexander’s blood pressure skyrocketing. “We’ll see,” Cary had said, like he was humoring a spoiled child. His confidence was unfounded, which made it all the more maddening. It should have made Alexander feel more secure in his position. There was no way Don Liu was going to pick Bell Capital. There was no denying that Cary had a way with money. His previous success was compelling. But in the end, Liu wasn’t just going to hand over billions of dollars to an untried company like Cary’s. To a person like Cary.
Realizing his breath had grown shallow, he forced slow, measured inhales as he walked toward the parking elevators. He had told himself that his abrupt departure would be destabilizing. He’d imagined Cary saving up things to say to him when the program was over and then having no opportunity to say them when Alexander never came back to his seat. But in truth, he’d had to leave the ballroom because he’d started to feel like he couldn’t breathe. So he wasn’t sure if hi
s departure had been a strategic offensive move or a retreat.
So, time to stop letting Cary rile him. On with the war.
“Hold the elevator!” Sticking his arm out to block the closing of the doors was instinctual. The voice had been feminine, and a man didn’t let an elevator door close in a woman’s face. He might be about as attracted to women as he was to a bedpost, but his mother had raised him right.
“Thanks,” she said, rushing on board and dropping her purse in the process. Dutifully, Alexander stooped to help her gather the spilled contents, so he didn’t realize that another person had slipped on board the elevator—until he heard the voice.
“Yes, thanks. I thought you were going to get away.”
You could hear the smirk, which should have been impossible. Alexander stood and handed a rogue pack of gum to the woman who stood between Cary and him. He glanced at the display panel. Five—his level—was lit up, as was three. The elevator clattered to a stop at three. The woman got off. Cary did not.
Fine. War.
He opened his mouth to accuse Cary of following him, but the bastard spoke first.
“I guess I was naive. I thought guys like you competed for clients all the time. Or, you know, guys who work for guys like you. I thought, hey, we’ll all make our cases to Liu, and he’ll choose the company he feels will maximize his profit. May the best man win and all that.”
Alexander was about to say something about how Cary wasn’t exactly the paragon of sportsmanship, was he, given how badly he’d thrown Alexander under the bus at camp, but he checked himself. He didn’t want Cary to know that he even remembered that day, much less that it still had any power over him. When they reached the fifth level of the garage, Alexander got off, deciding it was better not to acknowledge Cary’s little speech at all. His Ferrari was parked just two spots down from the elevator.
His Heart's Revenge (49th Floor Novels) Page 3
