by Holley Trent
“Or the pay grade,” Raleigh murmured.
“I...agree. Senior execs are in and out of the office too much. The point of contact has to be someone who can actually be reached.”
“I’m aware of that, Ms. Shannon.”
Ev rolled her eyes.
“Why the fuck is he like that?” Bruce murmured.
Everley waved off the query, though he could tell she wasn’t at ease with the circumstances. She’d started rubbing her temples.
“The job was mine last year,” Raleigh said. “And the year before. And...the year before, I believe.”
Ev’s jaw hinges tightened and lips pressed into a flat line.
She didn’t deserve the snark. He wrapped his arms around Ev’s neck and gave her an encouraging squeeze. It seemed like the sort of thing she would do for him. “Don’t let him rile you up,” he said into her ear. “He doesn’t deserve your energy.”
The squeeze she gave his wrist was probably meant to be conceding.
“Can you not just do it again, Raleigh?” someone asked. “After all, you won’t have a learning curve. You already know how the campaign works.”
“Yes, and I happen to know how many hours it takes. I logged them last year and informed HR precisely what the duties were so that everyone involved could understand how it’s impossible to put the task on one person without either forcing them to do unpaid labor or to undermine their efficiency in their usual job.”
“How about if you split it, then?” Ev asked on a sigh.
“Me?” Raleigh asked with incredulity.
“Wait, wait,” Joey said. “That might be a solution. If we can’t find one person with enough flexibility in their schedule to spearhead the event then we could put a team on it.”
“Don’t do it, Joey,” Raleigh warned.
“We’ll take it on. Yeah. Publicity will handle it this year if maybe editorial can commit to next year.”
“Fine with me,” a man said.
“Of course it’s fine with you,” Raleigh sniped. “You have the largest department.”
“Not our fault.”
As the cacophony of jeers rose up, Ev put her forehead against her desk and tapped it a few times against the wood.
“It’s all right,” Bruce whispered. “Don’t feel like you have to volunteer to prove anything to anyone.”
“But I have to,” Ev whispered back. “They know I can afford it.”
He couldn’t argue with that, even if he wanted to. She was probably right that they’d think that, and he hated that she was put into that situation—that she couldn’t say no.
She took a breath and gave Bruce’s arm another squeeze. “Listen,” she told the haggling Athena senior staff on the call. “This is getting needlessly complicated, I think. We’re all busy right now, but I don’t think the solution is to spread even more people thinner. I’ll organize the campaign this year with the caveat that HR or admin have someone in their departments absorb the duty next year.”
The call went quiet.
Ev turned to Bruce with brow furrowed and lips turned downward. “Did I sound too bossy?” she whispered. “That’d be the last thing I need right now when they all hate me already.”
“You did fine,” he insisted. If the fuckers at Athena thought otherwise, Bruce could suggest some deep breathing exercises they could try. Or else prescribe some eight-inch dildos. They always had a way of making Bruce relax.
“Awesome,” someone on the call finally said. “I know the major charity loves it when we show up in person at their holiday gala with the big check. You might want to go ahead and clear your calendar for that day.”
“What all am I getting myself into?” Ev asked, thumping her forehead again.
“Get up with Raleigh,” Joey said in the spirited tone of a man off the hook. “He’ll hand off the baton to you, in a matter of speaking.”
The staff of Athena all bounced off the call with few further pleasantries and the conference web page automatically logged her out.
“They didn’t even volunteer to help you,” Bruce said with a doleful shake of his head. “Why are they like that?”
“It’s fine, honey,” Ev said wearily. “It is what it is. I’m not expecting any pats on the back, but hopefully they’ll all think a little more charitably of me.”
“Even Raleigh?” Bruce drummed his fingertips with agitation against the sides of his arms. He couldn’t trust Raleigh to think charitably of any of his perceived enemies, and he hated him for making Everley one. She didn’t deserve it.
Ev stared at her computer screen. The machine was pinging, again and again, as emails streamed in—each with a series of attachments.
They were all from McKean, Raleigh C.
“Hot potato,” Ev murmured. “I guess I lose.”
She fired off a message to him when the pinging finally stopped.
Should we have a meeting to chat about this?
Raleigh’s response: I think that’s unnecessary, but if you need clarification on anything I can make the time.
Everley: I’ll read what you sent and will let you know by Monday.
Raleigh: Fine.
Raleigh signed his message with a dash and a simple R.
“So fucking rude. He should sign his whole name.”
“It’s fine.” Ev put her head back and laid a kiss on the underside of Bruce’s chin.
“It’s not fine. It’s cold.”
“Maybe, but you shouldn’t worry about it. I’m not.”
Ev retreated to her bedroom, ostensibly to finish getting ready. Bruce pressed his palms flat against the desktop and glowered at that dash and that R. Ev deserved better.
Bruce deserved better.
Ev had said, though—it is what it is.
It didn’t have to be that way, though.
In his idea of a perfect world, everyone would understand everyone else and they’d forgive each other for what they couldn’t say.
Real life didn’t work that way, though.
In real life, second chances meant the giver was a sucker and the recipient was a user, and so the default was to not have them.
But he’d be fine. Ev wasn’t a surrogate of the connection he’d desired with Raleigh. She was far more than that. She was his lesson that affection was supposed to be easy—both the giving of it and the receiving.
“I’m going to buy you a Purple Park Place, Ev,” he called out. “I’d buy you the sun if you wanted it, but a cocktail sounds all right for the time being.”
Staring at that screen, he couldn’t help himself. The impulsive little creatures that lived in his nervous system had him moving the cursor to the Reply button and his fingers dancing across the laptop’s keyboard.
“What the hell is a Purple Park Place?” she responded with a laugh. He loved her laugh.
“A god-awful drink the dinner theater serves. Comes with a cheese tray appetizer. Positively horrid but it’s something of a rite of passage there.”
You should be kinder to her. You won’t always be able to be like that. You’ll die lonely. Mark my words.
He clicked Send and closed the laptop lid.
Ev stepped out in a gray cardigan, a long black skirt, and black boots.
He assessed the masterpiece, framing the image of her with his hands. “Perfect.”
“You’re full of it.” She grabbed her purse and keys and marched toward the door. “But keep that up, anyway. Sometimes a girl needs to hear it.”
* * *
Mark my words.
“She must have finally gone off her rocker.” Raleigh stared at the message in his work inbox, perplexed.
He was still reeling from it as he carried a stack of hardcopy files to Everley’s office and dropped them on the corner of her desk. Up until that moment, Everley’s messages
had always been professional, even if somewhat meddling.
“Maybe she decided it didn’t matter anyway. She can do what she wants.”
Joey, still at work at almost eight on a Friday, poked his head out of his office. “What’s that, Ral?”
Raleigh opened his mouth to explain, but suddenly decided better of it. He didn’t need Joey to intercede on his behalf. Raleigh had been advocating for himself since he was a teenager.
“Ignore me. Being in the windowless center of a building is getting to me. Everything seems more claustrophobic with them having installed the holiday decorations earlier this year.”
“Yeah. Early as shit. They’re trying to get their money’s worth, I guess. Just try to ignore it until December first.”
“I’ll try.”
Joey suddenly perked up. “Hey! Since you’re here, I’m working on—”
“Joey,” Raleigh warned. He knew that lead-up tone. It always preceded some major project being dumped on his lap.
Joey put up his hands and retreated into his hidey-hole. “Had to try. That’s what managers do.”
“You’re only my manager because of a merger.” Raleigh couldn’t even remember which one anymore. Athena had been acquired, divested, and merged so many times in ten years that he could no longer remember who all had been there when he started.
“Okay, Mr. Lone Wolf. Don’t rub it in. If you feel any mercy at all for the guy who approves your time off requests for HR, though, you know where I’ll be.”
“Noted.”
Raleigh went into his office to fetch his coat and bag. He took one last glance at the open message before closing the computer.
The wording wasn’t right, or the point of view, maybe.
Either Everley was trolling him—which he, in spite of his wariness about the woman in general, doubted—or someone else had gotten into her email.
Know what that’s like.
Grimacing, he stabbed the elevator call button with his index finger. He supposed he had to think charitably of her, for the moment.
He could worry about who the hell had gotten into her inbox later.
It wouldn’t have been the first time Athena’s email server had gotten hacked. Their IT department was basically an extern, a can of compressed air, and a roll of duct tape.
Sometimes, though, even spam massages cut to the quick.
He was going to die lonely.
That was probably true.
Chapter Fourteen
“Christ, you’re harder to catch than Usain Bolt chasing a gold medal.”
Bruce invited his manager into his hotel room, mulling over Kit’s odd metaphor. It took him a moment to remember who Usain Bolt was.
“You’ve got to stop doing that, you know?” Kit laid in before Bruce even had a chance to turn back to him. “You can’t just go off the fucking grid when people are trying to reach you.”
“What are you trying to reach me for?” Bruce edged past him in the narrow corridor and retreated to the pile of papers on the desk that he’d been trying to make heads or tails of all morning. Investments he hadn’t made, but had been made for him. His father had chosen everything since Bruce wouldn’t. He’d been looking up some of the funds and ventures and hadn’t yet had a good feeling about a single one of them. They were profitable, but antithetical to Bruce’s evolving sense of world citizenship. He didn’t want to make money at the expense of some less fortunate person’s health or life. He had more money than he could ever spend. He didn’t need more of it.
Uninvited, Kit had a seat on the sofa and immediately started riffling through a leather portfolio. “I’ve got interest from about ten magazines who want to do features on you—”
“No.”
“—and it’d be good promo for the...what do you mean, no?”
Bruce shrugged. “Don’t want to.”
“Why the hell not? Do you understand how fame works?”
“Contrary to what you might think, I’m not a fucking idiot, Kit.”
Kit stared, agape.
Bruce didn’t hold his gaze. If he did, he’d change his mind even though he hadn’t done anything wrong. People he’d worked with had gotten so good at getting him to change his mind. Time and distance from them had rendered Bruce highly sensitive to the attempts, and he wasn’t going to let them railroad him anymore.
“Then let’s put this another way and see if that makes a difference,” Kit said flatly after a minute. “Do you understand that if you’re not making money, I’m not either?”
Bruce felt bad about that for the few seconds he took to remember that he’d already known Kit would use that defense. His nan had taught him that in that business, almost everything came down to money and he had to assume that was people’s first interest. Bruce was just a product.
“I can let you off the hook, if you want.” He shuffled through the papers again, resorting them into piles by priority. He wasn’t certain how to detach himself from those investments but it seemed increasingly vital to his mental health that he do so. His brother might know how. Arnold stayed on top of that shit. He was in South Africa all the time handling business.
“So, what, you’re not going to make music anymore?” Kit emitted one of those snorts Bruce tended to hear from people who had habits of underestimating the willpower of the people they engaged with.
Bruce may have gone along with the program before, but his recent company had taught him that there was no program.
Not for him, anyway, and that was okay. Ev had reminded him that was okay.
“I’m done with that now,” Bruce said.
“And when the hell did you decide that?”
“Dunno.” Bruce shrugged. “Maybe it’s been a long time coming.”
“You’re ridiculous. You know that? I’ve invested all this time and energy into making you into something and you turn around and say, nah, I’m done?” He scoffed. “Nah. Doesn’t work that way. You owe me. Do you understand? You owe me.”
Do I?
Bruce was wavering, and he knew it, but he hadn’t considered that before.
Kit had been on Bruce’s team for ten years. He’d paved Bruce’s way in America and helped turn him into a household name.
Bruce had gotten to play his music for people.
He should have been happy.
It didn’t seem like the right kind of happy, though. Or perhaps it was incomplete and it had taken Bruce a decade to figure out why. They’d packaged him into something he wasn’t. He wasn’t a rock star. He was a wildling from rural Scotland who held a tune all right.
I don’t owe him. I don’t owe him a thing.
That realization cleared out a bit of murk in the corner of his brain so the truth buried there could climb out.
“Your...contract is up, isn’t it?” Bruce smoothed down the corner of a fund transfer form and then bent it once more. “Never got around to renewing it.”
Kit didn’t say anything.
Neither did Bruce. Not saying anything was always hard, but silence was the only way he could say what he needed to.
He wasn’t a rock star. Just a musician. He could have his music and tell his stories without all the glamour. Without the spotlights and the unwanted jet setting.
In Bruce’s periphery, Kit got up, snatched his bag, and stormed toward the door.
“Do what you want. You won’t be successful. You can’t even talk to people.”
“I’m talking to you, aren’t I?” Bruce did meet his gaze, then, because Kit needed to understand. They all needed to understand. “That’s the problem with you. You think I only get it—whatever it is—if it’s the thing you want. But you didn’t stop to think that I didn’t want it.”
“Corrine said that—”
“Don’t drag my nan into this,” Bruce shouted.
Bruce wasn’t a shouter, and that was likely why Kit nearly leaped out of his skin.
He recovered quickly, though, straightening his cufflinks and turning that haughty stare to Bruce.
“She’s dead and gone,” Bruce said in a forced, quiet volume. “I’m still here. And if she were here, she’d be helping to get what I want next, whatever it may be.”
“And what is that, Bruce? Huh? What the hell do you want?”
Bruce went silent again and turned back to his papers.
“See, you don’t even know. Whatever. You’re going to fail without me. You’re going to fail without the band. I thought you’d come to your senses and hook back up with them, but I guess you’re not hurting enough, huh? You don’t care about anyone except yourself. All those people counting on the money. They’ve got to pay their mortgages and their kids’ school tuitions. You care about that? You don’t even—”
Kit said a lot of words but Bruce stared at his moving mouth without listening.
I’m not important unless they’re important.
Seemed like the start of a new song for that musical Ev said he should write. Sardonically upbeat. Bright instrumentation, perhaps with lots of flutes and bells. A slow transition to minor key. Ominous timpani.
Measures upon measures of anguished balladry and screaming pipe organ to wrap it all up.
It could be the big song right before the show went to intermission and the lead would walk off the stage with his head down and the spotlight trailing a few feet behind him.
But in act two, he’d get better.
He’d sort things out because he’d found someone to tell him that he could use his talents in different ways and that he could trust his abilities, even if he was anxious about the gaps in his knowledge. Even if he was certain he’d mess up many times before he landed successfully.
Everley had taught him that, perhaps without even meaning to.
The door slammed behind Kit.
Bruce stared at it for a minute, maybe more.
Then he picked up the phone and dialed his mother. He didn’t have a choice but to make her understand that he needed change. That meant getting rid of the things that he’d never wanted in the first place. He needed to put his life on course. He wanted to establish his own routines and set goals that made sense for Bruce at thirty-three and that he could grow further at forty.
