by Holley Trent
He didn’t like Bruce for what he’d done, but he’d done what Raleigh never could and asked for help. Bruce was extending trust to him even after everything, and Raleigh realized that Bruce could be so vulnerable in a way that Raleigh simply couldn’t be anymore.
Vulnerable people got used up.
Perhaps he’ll learn one day.
Bruce tracked a hand through the untied half of his hair and stared pensively at the window.
He walked around like that, completely oblivious to his appearance, or perhaps aware and uncaring. There was a certain appeal of that sort of comfort with one’s own body. It was a kind of bravery Raleigh didn’t possess. He put on a good front most of the time that other people’s opinions didn’t sway him, but they did. Every single one since his father had decided that he wanted to be a policymaker. Everyone around him had become more critical of him after that.
He edged around the desk and slid his index finger into Bruce’s loose hair elastic.
“It’s driving me to distraction,” he said when Bruce gave him a curious sideways look. Bruce’s hair was enviously thick and required rougher handling, but Raleigh managed to get it all scraped together at his nape and tidily bound. “Cut it if you’re not going to do anything with it.”
“Keeps me warm if I forget my hat.” Bruce’s brow creased as he smoothed a hand back from his hairline. “And no one cuts it right. They just do what they want.”
“You have to be descriptive.”
Bruce made a face.
Yeah.
Raleigh felt that way about a lot of things. Like vulnerability.
Fuck.
He picked up his phone and tapped in Joey’s extension. “Hey. I never do this, but I’m heading out early today. Need to get something done across town.” He assumed they were going across town, anyway, and hoped Bruce wouldn’t make him a liar.
“Everything all right?” Joey asked dispassionately.
He’d been sounding like that for a few days. He was swamped and disenchanted. As always, he’d come around whenever they were fully staffed again. Everley’s value became increasingly clear with each passing day she wasn’t there. She’d been an incredibly productive employee, and even her most introverted authors had been at ease with her.
“Fine,” Raleigh said to Joey, and he watched Bruce watch him with rapt curiosity, golden eyes intensely, brazenly fixed on him. “Just hard to get stuff done during daylight hours when you work seven to seven.”
“Yeah. You should see the accusing looks my dog gives me when I get home.”
“Sorry, Joe.” Raleigh disconnected before Joey could launch into one of his spiels about the unreliability of his dog walking service.
He stuffed some work into his bag, and grabbed his keys and coat before he could change his mind. “Let’s go.”
“But you said no.”
“I did. I had a change of heart.”
“Why?”
So you don’t become as broken and cynical as me.
“Where’s the thing?” Raleigh deflected. “Earlier’s better than late.” If they got started earlier, Raleigh could get the hell out of the city earlier and maybe even see Everley before obscene o’clock.
“Oh!” Bruce grabbed his guitar. “Not far. Just up Forty-Second. You going?”
“Just to get you out of my office.”
“Oh.”
Bruce had an extraordinary range of motion in his expressions, so his instant shift from hopefulness to despair was evident and shattering. Contrary to what many people might have thought, Raleigh didn’t actually enjoy hurting people’s feelings. Caustic words had simply become his primary defense mechanism, and he didn’t always intend to deploy them. His reflexes were broken.
He murmured an apology as they walked.
Bruce waved it off and said “Used to it” under his breath.
There went that sharpened brick again.
“I’m out for the day,” Raleigh told the receptionist as they passed.
He called the elevator. It was empty when it arrived. Bruce stared solemnly at the crease between the doors as it descended and fidgeted the end of his guitar case.
Raleigh gathered his messy, scattered thoughts of vanity and vulnerability and savage honesty and swept them away for the moment. Bruce had been looking for Everley. She’d thought he was gone for good, but there he was looking for her.
She probably didn’t ever make him think he should beg.
“What is it that you like about Everley?” Raleigh murmured. “What makes you trust her?”
The questions hung in the air for a long moment before it dawned on Raleigh that the words had come out of his mouth.
Someone joined the elevator on the fifth floor. The men parted toward their respective sides of the car to make room and said nothing further until they’d reached the lobby.
“She listens first,” Bruce said.
“First?”
“She doesn’t say what’s what until she’s heard the whole thing, and then not for a while after that, either.”
Raleigh was about to hail a cab and had just stepped to the curb, but Bruce grabbed his wrist. “Hold on. I have a service for when I’m in the city. Prepaid. Might as well get my money’s worth. You can call it. I don’t have my phone.”
Of course you don’t.
If nothing else, Bruce stayed true to character.
Raleigh had to respect that.
He let Bruce put in the number and handled the rest of the request for him. Five minutes, they’d quoted.
They could wait inside the building, where the temperatures weren’t indicative of Demeter’s wrath and where a certain coatless rock star wouldn’t be at risk of hypothermia.
But Bruce seemed content with being outside. Bright eyed. Looking about with curiosity, staring up at tall buildings. Attention snatched by people leaning rudely on car horns and the scathing opinions of city-hardened pedestrians.
It was hard to think uncharitable thoughts about Bruce when he was like that—when his attention was captured and his curiosity working in overdrive.
He’d looked at Raleigh that way, months ago. He hadn’t known to be flattered then, but he thought he was.
When the car arrived, Raleigh helped him stow his guitar in the trunk and crowded into the back seat with him.
Bruce ferreted a crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it to the driver. “Actually wrote it down this time,” he said to Raleigh as the car edged into traffic. “I usually try to remember but when I’ve got too much going on I forget things.”
“How do you function? I can’t live the way you do. I need to carry details with me.”
“Yes, because you’re a proper, rational human being who thrives on structure, whereas I’m wired to pick up my spear at the slightest provocation and run off on a hunt.” Bruce tried to angle himself more ergonomically in the tight space, putting his left foot on the hump at the center. “That’s what my nan said. She said everyone’s a way for a reason. Sometimes there are advantages. Sometimes, they have to...make accommodations to fit in. We weren’t so good at figuring those out at first, and I admit that too soon I started leaning on Ev because she’s so bloody everything, you know? I’m going to do better.” He pointed a warning finger at Raleigh. “I’m not turning Ev into my keeper. I swear I’m not. I just want her.”
Of course you do.
Unfortunately, that made two of them.
Suspecting that he was going to wake up with yet another sore jaw, Raleigh gritted his teeth, anyway. That mysterious email he’d gotten from Everley’s account suddenly returned to haunt him—that he was going to die lonely. He refused to believe that was true.
“I’ve got a therapist for that,” Bruce said. “She’s a right bitch at the moment, but I can’t blame her. Here I am, thirty-three fucking ye
ars old, rich as Croesus, and I’ve never stayed still long enough to get into a routine. I’m sure she and my doctor are having wonderfully sigh-filled conference calls as they try to sort out what’s what. You see, I have a grab bag of issues playing off each other.”
Enemy. Competitor. It didn’t matter. When Bruce talked, Raleigh absorbed the words. Devoured them, really. “Does that frighten you?”
“What? Knowing the names they put on that shit?”
“Yes.”
Bruce shrugged. “Doesn’t really change anything, does it? Brioche is still white bread, even if you don’t know the fancy name for it.”
Raleigh envied that sort of logic. It was a different sort of practicality than he possessed. It was part of that seductive rawness, Raleigh supposed—that urgency that made him so aware that he was made of flesh and flesh craved touch.
“Doesn’t it frighten you?” Bruce asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Some people act like it’s contagious. It doesn’t rub off, you know. None of it. Not the ADHD, not the Asperger’s, not my mood disorder.”
“I didn’t know you had any of those things. Hadn’t suspected them, and hadn’t thought that I should.” They were in one of the most diverse places in the world, and rarely was his immediate thought to attach a diagnosis to someone’s unpredictable behavior. If he started doing that, he couldn’t be surprised if others started doing the same to him. “I’m not frightened of you. Not for that, anyway.”
“Then why?”
Raleigh didn’t respond because he couldn’t lie.
He couldn’t say that he terrified him. Bruce had become the living embodiment of Raleigh not being able to get what he wanted.
Or who, rather.
First “Theo,” and Everley could possibly be next.
Bruce didn’t push. Pushing never got anyone anywhere with Raleigh, anyway.
“That’s in the film, you know,” Bruce said after a minute.
“No, I didn’t know.”
“Band didn’t want anyone to find out. I don’t care if they do. I can’t be the only one like this. People shouldn’t have to be afraid to admit it. People punish them for being honest.”
“I agree. They do. Nothing I say can fix that, but I hear you.”
“That’s all I want sometimes.”
It didn’t seem like much to Raleigh.
When they arrived at the small theater and Bruce had overtipped the driver and fetched his guitar from the trunk, he held his head up with confidence until they got into the lobby. Then he turned to Raleigh in a panic.
Before he could get a word out, Raleigh said, “I’ll listen. That’s what you wanted, right? An extra head.”
“Right. Just for a bit.” Bruce notched his teeth into his lower lip and turned his gaze toward the open auditorium doors.
“I won’t say anything,” Raleigh said. “I’ll sit where you want and I’ll keep my mouth shut unless something smells off.”
“So you’re just going to let me blather unfettered? Thanks a lot.”
“Yes.”
“You hate me that much?”
“I don’t hate you, Bruce.”
“You don’t?”
Raleigh shoved his fingers through the last vestiges of styling product in the back of his hair and tugged as he forced out some air.
God, that earnest fucking face.
Just standing there looking at him was driving that brick further into his chest.
“I’ll be honest,” Raleigh said. “After what happened, I found it incredibly difficult to be anywhere near you. I felt like you’d manipulated me, and I’ve been trying to cut people like that out of my life for nearly twenty years.”
“What about now? You don’t want to be around me now?”
I’m here, aren’t I?
“You know,” Raleigh hedged, “you have a very intense personality.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
“Depends on who you need to impress, usually.”
“I don’t impress you?”
Raleigh put a hand to Bruce’s back and got him walking toward the auditorium doors. He hoped that whomever he needed to see was already inside and that they could escalate the appointment.
“I won’t forget I asked you,” Bruce whispered. They paused in the doorway, letting their eyesight adjust to the darker room.
Raleigh spotted a cluster of musicians down in the pit and a couple of people who looked like decision makers studying piles of paper at the stage edge.
“I want an answer,” Bruce said as they started down the carpeted aisle.
“Why does it matter if you impress me or not?” Raleigh whispered.
“Because I want to know if you think my personality is bad.”
Fuck.
Had he implied that? He certainly hadn’t intended to.
Raleigh dragged a hand down his weary face and placed a firm grip on Bruce’s arm. He was too busy watching Raleigh that he wasn’t watching the floor.
“I don’t think your personality is bad. You just frustrate me.”
“I know all about frustration. It lives in me. It’s a constant companion and feeds my social ails. It tangles up my thoughts and makes my words come out all wrong or too late.”
“Well, you hide it well. Mostly, your face is an open book, but every so often, you have a way of looking like you don’t actually give a shit about anything.”
“Like right now?”
“Yes.”
Bruce’s expression was as dead as a mannequin’s.
“That’s interesting because I give a shit about you and I’m looking at you right now.”
Bruce looked forward before Raleigh could think of anything else to say. It was just in time to catch the hand of one of the ladies who’d climbed out of the pit.
“I give a shit about you,” Bruce had said. If it was a lie, it was a well-sharpened one that could slice clean through to the bone, but Bruce couldn’t possibly know how badly Raleigh needed to hear it.
“Yay, you’re early. I’m so glad. If you’ve got bits of score for me to photocopy, we’ll jump right in and see if we can make the sounds meld with what we’ve already got. I’m Karen Settle, by the way.”
Bruce’s features opened up once more. “Yes, yes. Took me a moment to recognize you. Glasses aren’t right. You got new ones?”
“My...glasses? I—” Gaping, she put a hand against her heart, but quickly regained her composure. “I got bored with the cat-eye frames. After thirty years, my optician convinced me to move on. No one else noticed that.”
“That was what my memory filed you under. Cat eyes.” To Raleigh, he said, “Director and a fantastic musician in her own right. Played harp with the philharmonic for years and then hid in the pit at the NYC Ballet for a while. Can’t miss her if you know her style, though. Her percussion instincts are impeccable.”
“Hey!” she grinned. “I love it when people know I didn’t come fully formed out of a giant seashell and decided to show up here to make shows. I put in my years.”
“Oh, I could go on for hours talking about that modernized piano accompaniment you wrote into Johnny Gallagher’s new rendition of ‘Sleigh Ride.’”
She groaned with her head back. “Christ, no one bought that record.”
“Obviously, he did,” Raleigh murmured, eying him with some of the curiosity and wonder Bruce must have felt for the things that caught his attention. He wouldn’t put it past Bruce to buy every record and to know a little bit about all the major players.
“Of course I bought it,” Bruce told him. “Nan loved Johnny. Had the hugest crush on him since she was a little girl. She’d be tickled pink to hear that ancient motherfucker is still recording.”
“Cute.” Raleigh chuckled.
Or maybe Bruce was c
ute when he talked about his grandmother. Or because he was lively and passionate. And he was just a good time if he could be kept up with. Sometimes, Raleigh forgot what that felt like.
Karen tried, and failed, to suppress a snort of laughter with a hand over her nose. “So, who’s this?” she squeaked out. She tilted her head toward Raleigh.
“Raleigh McKean,” Bruce said, handing her a sheath of loose music from his bag. “He’s the—”
As dread pooled in his gut, Raleigh turned his head, prepared for the undesired appellation and the aftermath. That he was a senior publicist at Athena. That he was the son of a controversial senator.
But instead of completing the statement, Bruce took a breath.
“He’s...the guy,” he stated.
Bewildered by the abstract appellation, Raleigh faced forward in time to see Karen’s brows knit. “The guy?”
Bruce shrugged. “Sometimes you’ve got to bring along a guy, and this one’s mine.”
Raleigh knew there was no way in hell that ill-defined statement was going to fly.
“Oh!” Karen said, perking up. “I used to have a guy.”
Raleigh let out the quietest of guffaws. Are you kidding me? Only in Bruce’s world would such an exchange be accepted and perhaps even expected.
“Carried my coat sometimes and told me I was pretty after I got bad haircuts,” Karen said in a wistful tone. “He got poached away by a competitor who could pay him a little more.”
“Do you want me to tell you you’re pretty, Bruce?” Raleigh asked, deadpan.
“You think my haircut’s that bad?”
“I swear, you leapfrog to outlandish conclusions like no one else.”
Bruce smirked. “So, you like it, then.”
He was fishing for a compliment. Raleigh realized he did that a lot.
He also realized that he probably needed them more than most.
“I like it,” Raleigh confessed. Liked everything about Bruce’s dangerous panther look, really, even if it was chaotic.
Karen bounded away, waving the music in the air and shouting at a production assistant.
Grinning, Bruce loosened his scarf and draped it over the back of the chair in the front row. “You think I’m pretty.”
