"You sell art, and you're hardly ever at the office. What could possibly be stressful about that?"
"Darling," Liam chastised him. "You say that as someone who's never had to find just the right thing for a nouveau riche client who demands that her art match the drawing room drapes." He shuddered melodramatically.
Truly, Nolan couldn't imagine how his life could get any worse.
And then the gifts started to arrive.
Chapter 4
In the breakroom the next afternoon, Nolan sat down to his usual lunch of salad, whole grain bread, and banana. As a member of the health profession, he believed very fervently that you were, in fact, what you ate. He took his first bite of endive and contemplated the vase of daisies someone had placed on the table. Nolan had always had a soft spot for daisies, their elegant simplicity, the mathematical precision at the heart of them. These particular daisies were by far the most beautiful ones he'd ever seen, tall and graceful, snowy petals and plump centers with perfect Golden Spirals.
A note sat propped against the vase, cream-colored card stock, expensive by the feel of it. In contrast, the writing inside looked like a third-grader had been let loose, erratic and ungainly, a waste of a good fountain pen.
With the deepest gratitude for a truly transformative experience.
Nolan boggled, frankly, that the writer had been able to spell "transformative." He supposed Marco would be pleased that the Eastman Spa had developed a clientele loyal enough to send them barely literate thank you notes.
Anna breezed in, stopped by the table, and gave Nolan a long, speculative stare as if she'd never seen him before in her life.
"Yes, this is me eating my lunch," he told her.
"Do you like the flowers?"
He shrugged. His appreciation of daisies was something he preferred to keep a private matter.
Anna's lips quirked. "Is this you trying to be macho?"
"Bite me," he said around a mouthful of greens.
Anna smirked. "You totally like the flowers." She sauntered off looking pleased with herself.
Sometimes Nolan thought the entire Eastman Spa staff—himself excluded of course—dearly needed an intervention.
A few minutes before three, Nolan let out a deep breath and gathered all his courage and went to face his bi-weekly Liamian misadventure.
"Good afternoon, Nolan," Liam said when he came into the room.
Today, Liam had on black slacks and a plum-colored button-up shirt, almost somber for him. He didn't lunge into Nolan's personal space, or start putting on a striptease, or even stare like he was imagining doing filthy, possibly illegal things to Nolan's person. Frankly, this was more restraint than Nolan would have given him credit for.
He regarded Liam with a confused frown. "What's wrong with you? Are you sick or something?"
"Or something."
This only made Nolan frown harder. "Well—you know what to do. I'll be back in five."
He returned to find Liam lying docilely beneath the sheet. He greeted Nolan with a polite smile and lowered his head and let out an anticipatory breath. He hadn't called Nolan "darling" even once. The fact that Nolan found this confounding only made Liam more infuriating than ever.
During the massage, Liam actually—cooperated. He allowed Nolan to guide him with perfect compliance, didn't turn over until Nolan held up the sheet, and while he did make the usual sinful pleasure noises, they seemed to spill out of him almost involuntarily.
"Mm, you do have magic hands, Nolan," he said at one point, although it sounded sincere and admiring rather than like a snippet of lousy porn dialogue the way his compliments usually did.
Nolan grew more confused by the moment.
Once on his back, Liam closed his eyes, also unlike him, and the lack of distraction left Nolan with far too much time to contemplate how beautiful Liam's body was. He moved his hands vigorously up and down Liam's arm. Nolan's inner hedonist that he usually kept carefully in check, practically did cartwheels, reveling in the sheer gorgeousness of taut, cut muscles. There was even something whimsical and appealing about the god-awful ugly body art.
When Nolan finished, Liam fluttered his eyes open, drowsy and sated, no doubt the same way he'd look after—Nolan swallowed hard. He almost regretted the absence of the obnoxiousness that made it so easy to ignore everything else about Liam.
"Thank you, Nolan. Truly you are a virtuosos at what you do." There was something in his voice, something almost fond, and that had to be a trick of some sort.
Pieces started to fit themselves together in Nolan's head: the grade-school writing on the note and Anna's insistence that Nolan liked the daisies and Liam's sudden turnabout. He blurted out in surprise, "The flowers, they were—" From Liam, and not for the entire Eastman Spa staff at all.
Liam smiled softly. "A little bird suggested that lechery wasn't the way to your heart, so I thought I'd try a different tack."
"Let me guess. This little bird's name is Anna."
"The bird prefers to remain anonymous."
Nolan snorted. "I'm curious. Is lechery the way to anyone's heart?"
"You'd be surprised."
Nolan rolled his eyes. Liam had to be the most ridiculous person alive, and anyway, Nolan knew perfectly well it was his pants Liam wanted into, not his heart.
"Oh, I wouldn't mind that either, of course," Liam said as if he could read Nolan's mind. His gaze traveled lovingly up Nolan's body.
Nolan shook his head. "You really can't help yourself, can you?"
Liam grinned winningly.
At the first opportunity, Nolan hunted down Anna, haranguing her in the breakroom, where she was drinking coffee and trying to read a magazine.
"Why are you encouraging him?"
To Anna's credit, she didn't put on an innocent face and ask who? Nolan hated it when people insulted his intelligence.
"I'm not encouraging him," she corrected. "I'm redirecting his efforts. There's a difference. He doesn't need any encouragement. He's wholly committed all on his own.
"You mean he ought to be committed," Nolan said meanly.
Anna gave him a mildly pitying look.
"What?" Nolan demanded.
"Don't you think it's time you got over this thing?"
"What thing? I don't have a thing?"
"You really, really do. A thing where it pisses you off to find someone attractive, and you come up with a long list of reasons to hate the poor guy, and you refuse to give him the time of day no matter how much you actually like him."
"It does not piss me off to find someone attractive! That's stupid. I go on dates. I have boyfriends. I don't know what the fuck you're talking about."
"No?" Anna gave him the skeptically raised eyebrow, which Nolan really, really hated.
"Come on! You met Dale. We were together for seven months before he left on that grant to do field research in Paraguay."
Anna pulled a face.
"What?" Nolan demanded.
"Nothing."
"Anna."
"Okay, fine, but remember you asked. Dale was a mouth-breather who only ate white food and thought watching documentaries about insect larvae was a racy way to spend a Saturday. You may have dated him, but there's no way you genuinely found him attractive."
"He was doing critical work on the Leiophron argentinensis Shaw!"
"Yes, I'm sure you had a deep, meaningful connection over wasps," Anna said sadly. "Look, Nolan, I know you don't talk about whatever happened, and far be it from me to pry."
Nolan snorted, loudly.
Anna gave him a hard look. "Because I'm not nosy. But it doesn't take a genius to figure out that you were once totally screwed over by somebody buff, tattooed and charming. Because that is your type, and you run away from every guy even remotely like that, as fast and far as you can go."
Nolan scowled at her, but before he could argue the point, Leo came trudging into the room, still sniffling and no doubt spreading contagion. He looked from Nolan to Anna and
back again, his forehead becoming more creased by the moment. "What are you two talking about?"
"Nolan's future husband!" Anna declared gleefully before Nolan could snap, "None of your fucking business!"
Leo's eyes went wide and crazed, like the paranoid lunatic he was. "You're all conspiring against me!"
"Oh my fucking God! Has no one around this place ever even heard the word 'professionalism'?" Nolan stomped away before the urge to chuck all his co-workers out the window became overpowering.
Chapter 5
"I'm going to be out of town for a week or so," Liam said after their next session, corralling Nolan out in the waiting room. "So I've brought a little something to keep me in your thoughts." He foisted a silver-foil-wrapped package into Nolan's hands.
"I can't accept this, Liam," Nolan informed him loftily.
Liam just smiled. "I'll count the moments until I see your lovely, scowling face again."
"Hey—"
Liam managed to slip out the door before Nolan could shove the present back at him. He turned to find every last pair of eyes in the place riveted on him. Flores Goodridge, a socialite who'd already been through four husbands and was working on the fifth, gave him the thumb's up. Mrs. Wollenski was once again snapping pictures on her phone.
Nolan turned on his heel and walked purposefully to the back. He absolutely did not blush and run away like an embarrassed teenager. In the break room, he sat with the gift on the table, surveying it with all the wariness of a bomb squad technician. He resolved not to open it—for about three seconds—before giving in to the fact that he was only human, with a fully functioning sense of curiosity.
Once he'd dispensed with the wrapping paper, he really could only stare.
Everyone had a weakness, a secret indulgence, even someone like Nolan, who prided himself on being a paragon of locally grown, organic eating. Here was his weakness: a shrink-wrapped package of sugary, electric-yellow, artificial-preservative-laden Peep-shaped goodness, two months past the Easter holiday, just turning stale the way Nolan liked them. A note had been messily taped to the wrapping paper, and in the same barely literate scrawl was written: I cherish an ambition of getting you mussed and exasperated and feeding you these with my own fingers. A man must have some aspirations in life.
Nolan's traitorous brain painted by numbers, bringing the scene vividly to life, himself and Liam and no clothes anywhere to be seen, on a fluffy white bed, with an endless supply of yellow marshmallow chicks so they wouldn't have to get up for sustenance. In the next breath, Nolan became murderously furious—at himself and Liam and perhaps most of all at Marco.
This weakness for Peeps was a carefully guarded secret, known only to Marco by way of a drunken confession the last time—and there would never be another one because Nolan had finally wised up—a buff, tattooed guy with porn lips had broken his heart into little, bitter pieces. Nolan had gone to drown his grief at the bar where he and the heartbreaker used to spend quiet Friday evenings together. About two hours in, he'd completely lost sight of his long-held "don't mix different kinds of alcohol" rule, and zigzagged across the spectrum of booze. He'd topped off the evening with shots of Goldschlager because, at the end of a long night of drinking, this was exactly the kind of thing that seemed like a good idea.
That was when Marco had shown up—called by the bartender, who'd taken Nolan's phone without his realizing it. Marco wrangled him home and put him to bed. On the way, apparently, Nolan felt the need to babble the pathetic details of his breakup. He'd confided the final indignity: that the heartbreaker had brought home a box of Peeps without offering to share them, realizing perfectly well they were Nolan's favorite, and he'd taken the box with him when he'd gone. Truly, Nolan had been about seven sheets to the wind. He would never have remembered this pitiful babbling if Marco hadn't brought it up the next day in a painfully misguided attempt to go all Oprah on Nolan's personal life. Marco, who had the emotional sensitivity of a scalpel.
The point was: there was only one way Liam could have found out about Nolan's guilty Peep love.
He stormed into Marco's office. Apparently, Marco had been expecting the visit, because he was wearing his braced-for-bad-news expression, the way he looked before every quarterly meeting with his accountant.
"Stop interfering!" Nolan pointed a finger, as menacing as he could manage without an actual weapon in hand.
"Nolan, it's time you got over this thing of yours."
"Why does everyone think I have a thing?
"Maybe because you do?"
Nolan glared. A sensible person would surely have been cowed by his fierceness, but this was Marco, who'd never been sensible a day in his life.
"Look, Nolan, you can't let a few bad experiences cut you off from new possibilities. You're worth more than that. You have so much to offer."
A lecture on self-esteem from Marco Cobb—this set a new mark for excruciating experiences Nolan hoped never to repeat.
Marco met Nolan's eye and smiled in a steady, supportive, fatherly way. It was all too easy to imagine him having much this same conversation with James or Phillipa.
"You realize I am almost thirty years old and not actually one of your children?"
"Yes, I realize that, Nolan," Marco said, in a stiff, wholly unbelievable way.
"Stay out of my personal life!"
There was a pause. "Okay, Nolan, if that's what you want."
This was perhaps the most unbelievable thing of all.
Chapter 6
It had long been the ambition of Nolan's parents to retire somewhere very far away from the sloppy, dispiriting sight of Queens in winter. The day after Nolan's father sold his accounting business, they packed their bags for Boca, left the family home in Nolan's care, and never looked back.
Nolan had a whole song-and-dance he went through to explain why he still lived in the same house he'd grown up in: where else would he ever find so much space, and who could argue with living completely rent-free, and Astoria was only twenty minutes away from midtown when the N was running right. This was all completely true and yet also total bullshit.
The fact was Nolan liked Queens. He liked pizza from Abruzzi's and produce from Mr. Costas's store on the corner and the old guys who sat on the bench outside the bakery smoking and gossiping. Nolan liked his parents' house. He liked his mother's rooster clock above the stove in the kitchen, and his father's office with all the old accounting books still on the shelves, and the worn Arts and Crafts style wallpaper in the hallway that had been there since Nolan was born.
Nolan had Mondays and Wednesdays off. As with most of his off days, he spent this one at his father's stolid, battered old desk industriously at work on his thesis. At least if it could be called "industry" to read the occasional page of Walden and then stare absently into space for long minutes. Nolan had done the doctoral program in American Studies at Columbia, completed his coursework, and written a draft of his dissertation. Just as soon as he finished tinkering with it, he'd defend it, get his degree, and move on to the next phase of his life.
If you could call it "tinkering" when he'd been at it for almost three years now.
"How did I manage to raise such a perfectionist?" Nolan's mother once asked in exasperation.
"Degas used to buy back his paintings to work on them some more, you know," Nolan had said in his defense. It wasn't about perfection, a point he'd never been able to explain—well, to anyone. He just needed to feel like he'd given his work everything he had. He needed to be finished in the truest sense of the word. Sadly, Columbia wouldn't let him take back his thesis from the library shelf and re-edit it if he changed his mind about something. Degas would have understood.
He read another page and resolutely refused to wonder if Liam knew that story about Degas and if perhaps he, too, might understand. Nolan's computer sat in front of him, Google just a click away. He'd been resisting the temptation all morning to put it to work on Liam. That seemed like giving Liam something he might want,
and Nolan was opposed to this on principle. But as Nolan considered it more, it began to seem only right—turnabout and quid pro quo and whatever. If Liam could use Nolan's so-called friends to invade his privacy, then Nolan could damned well use the Internet. Besides, Liam would never know.
Liam really does like pictures of himself, was Nolan's first thought as he sifted through the Google results. There were shots of him smiling at the camera from four continents. The most recent articles mentioned shows at his gallery and deals he'd helped to broker. The further Nolan dug, though, the seedier the references became. "Art dealer suspected in Vermeer forgery, no charges brought" blared across the front page of The Telegraph, accompanied by a picture of a younger Liam wearing a predictable smirk.
"Ha!" Nolan said out loud to no one in particular. Liam was a rogue, in all sorts of ways, and Nolan felt more justified than ever for not giving him the least bit of consideration.
The phone interrupted his gloating.
"I hear you have a new man in your life." Yusuf sounded amused.
Nolan let out his breath. Of course, Yusuf had gotten this misinformation from Anna, whom he'd been dating since his second year in grad school at Columbia. That was where the three of them had met.
"It's a scurrilous falsehood," Nolan assured him.
"Nolan. Still not over your thing?"
"Oh for fuck's sake, there is no thing!"
"That you sound like you're about to have an aneurysm would beg to differ," Yusuf said dryly.
"Everyone I know can just fuck off and die already," Nolan grumbled.
Yusuf laughed. "But then who would have you over this Friday night for stuffed brook trout and all the Merlot you can drink?"
Yusuf was a brilliant cook, so sadly there was no arguing the point.
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