by Sidney Bell
He plucked Dillon’s cell phone out of his pocket while the bodyguard stood there wincing. He knew enough to be wary of Embry, but he was downright scared of Joel, which put the bastard in a difficult position. Embry was unsympathetic as he dialed Joel’s cell.
“Well? Is he there yet?” Joel snapped.
“I don’t know how I’m supposed to take this,” Embry said, injecting an audible amount of hurt and anger into his voice.
Joel was silent for a minute. “Embry, I was worried about you.”
“Worried about me? Or worried about what I was doing?” Embry laughed bitterly, trying to ignore the fact that it was a very similar laugh to Brogan’s earlier. “I’ll tell you what. Tomorrow you can look at my receipt and we can go from there. Maybe you can give me a call later in the week when you’re done implying that I’m a whore.”
He pressed the disconnect button, shoved the phone into Dillon’s fumbling hands, smiled politely into the man’s bright red face and went inside, slamming the door behind him, the sound of the already-ringing phone resonating through the wood. He lingered by the jamb and listened as Dillon explained that Embry had gone inside, but had been carrying a duffel bag as if he’d been traveling.
A few seconds after that, Dillon knocked, calling that Joel would like to talk to him. Embry called, “Fuck off!”
It wasn’t long before his own cell rang. He didn’t answer—caving too soon wouldn’t be believable—and made a cup of decaf coffee while he waited. He sipped it as he went through some mail.
The next time Joel called, Embry answered. They fought for a while and Embry found himself having to watch his words. Embry had no delusions about his own guilt in making Brogan feel like shit, but he couldn’t help his fury at Joel, whose possessiveness forced the issue. He gave in before he probably should’ve, but he needed to get off the phone before he lost his temper and made a mistake.
He was tempted to see if he could twist this into an excuse to keep Joel away the next day, but then he thought of the anger Joel had displayed during that first phone call at Brogan’s, and he didn’t dare. He’d taken enough of a risk already.
* * *
The next morning, Embry handed Joel the materials he’d crafted, waiting with put-on anger—and very real caution—as the man looked the documents over.
Joel’s fingers rested on the robot Embry had drawn.
“I’m sorry,” he said, looking up, a small smile playing on his lips. He tapped the robot. “You’re still so young, Embry. I forget sometimes that you’re mature beyond your years in so many ways. Of course you wouldn’t do anything stupid. You know what we have. We would both lose so much.”
Subtle, Embry thought, tempted to roll his eyes. But that would be suicide, so he only nodded.
“We’ll leave around three, yes?” Joel asked. “Will that give you enough time to get your work done?”
“Three’s fine,” Embry replied, pretending to sulk, and Joel came around the desk.
“I’ve said I’m sorry, pet, even though I don’t know how you could blame me for wanting to hold on to you. You mean the world to me.”
Embry forced his shoulders to relax as Joel cupped the back of his head and pulled him into a kiss. The feel of his mouth was familiar enough—this was one kiss among hundreds, after all—but for the first time in months, Embry had to stop himself from jerking back. It felt wrong. Like a violation of something deep inside himself. For the first time, he felt not just disgusted, but diminished by Joel’s touch. For the first time, he felt like he should demand better for himself.
That was Brogan’s doing, he supposed, and that only made it worse, because he was also violating Brogan’s trust. Embry wasn’t sure how he managed to be convincing until he could excuse himself to the bathroom.
He went down to the one on his own floor so Joel wouldn’t walk in on him. He washed his mouth out, then leaned against the sink and stared into the mirror.
“Son of a bitch,” he whispered.
* * *
It was the hardest day he’d had since the beginning.
His first meeting was with the head of purchasing, the head of facilities, Joel and Oriole Touring himself. The CEO was in his late sixties, white-haired, bent at the shoulders and skinny, and he radiated an air of reptilian watchfulness. He was flat-eyed and his mouth was always pinched like he’d been eating lemons.
Joel had said enough that Embry knew the old man was the driving force behind the illegal sales, but he was also relatively certain that Touring had nothing to do with Embry’s family being killed. Joel didn’t pay for a single damn expense out of pocket unless he was hiding it from Touring, and the money paid to Coop for the murders had come directly out of Joel’s accounts.
Despite this, Embry was uncomfortable around the old man. Very little scared him these days—a convenient side effect of emotional dissociation—but during meetings, Touring would stare at him until Embry’s skin crawled. Embry had been very, very careful to act like a normal executive assistant around him, but Touring seemed to find him distasteful no matter what.
If something arose that implied a traitor, Touring’s eye would land on Embry, and he wouldn’t be put off with Joel’s protestations the way Coop was.
Embry sat beside Joel and made copious notes, hopefully the image of a devoted employee. By the time they walked out, though, he could’ve vibrated out of his skin with tension. The staring always unsettled him, but today it felt especially egregious. Maybe it was just that Embry was already on edge knowing what he’d have to do this afternoon. Maybe it wasn’t.
His gut roiled with anxiety the entire rest of the day. He growled at multiple people, which wasn’t out of character, although it was bad enough that he was pretty sure he’d made one of the admin assistants cry—her chin wobbled as she left. He berated himself for a moment, imagining Brogan’s disapproval, then waited outside the ladies’ room until she came out with red eyes.
She accepted his apology with a stumbled “thank you,” and then he escaped back into his office, narrowly avoiding slamming the door. He canceled his next meeting, because if he had to interact with Alan Hemmings—arrogant as a Roman god on the best of days—he might end up in jail for murder, and it wouldn’t even be the one he most wanted to commit.
He kept feeling.
Ten minutes before lunch, Joel called to say that they’d be eating in his office.
Embry agreed, cool and professional, hung up, counted to ten, then chucked his phone across his office. Any other time, someone might’ve come to check if he’d been injured, but he’d been unpleasant enough today that everyone was probably just hoping it was true. He didn’t blame them. He wanted to gouge his own eyes out.
Lunch was torture. Embry’s cafeteria salad tasted like sawdust, and he couldn’t tell if that was due to the shitty quality of the food or his unease. Worse, Joel kept touching Embry’s leg and each time it became more difficult not to break the bastard’s wrist. At one point Joel deposited a smear of teriyaki sauce on Embry’s pants, and Embry almost shoved him away.
Embry let some of his natural reticence shine through—he was supposed to be sullen and resentful that Joel didn’t trust him, after all—but he forced himself to warm up over the course of the meal as Joel’s attempts to soothe him continued. His smiles felt wooden.
Joel groped him on his way out, and Embry nearly bit his own lip off trying to stay still and allow it.
Not long after, as he changed into the spare pair of trousers he kept in his office, he noticed the bruises on his hip that Brogan left while they were having sex. Three small purple spots on his back, just above the curve of his buttocks. For a moment he got lost in the memory of that sensation, of Brogan moving inside him fast and hard and deep, holding him as if he would never let go.
He finished getting dressed, then stood there dumbly, wo
ndering what to do about it. He couldn’t think of a lie that would explain them—they were obviously bruises from someone holding his hips while fucking him, and it’d been long enough since Joel had fucked him that he couldn’t pretend Joel left them. Makeup wouldn’t work—it’d smear. The only thing he could think of was to make the marks darker so they’d look like he banged into something.
And this was what it’d come to. Hurting himself to keep the man he was fucking—the man who’d ordered his family’s deaths—from getting suspicious about the fact that he’d had sex with someone else, someone he might be falling in love with, who was completely disgusted with him.
For a heartbeat, he resented them—his parents and Amy, his helpless dead. When it faded, he felt guilty on top of everything else.
He thought he might buckle under the weight of it all.
So he shut it down. He closed his eyes and forced himself to think of the cold, to bury it all. He had no room for emotion—guilt or otherwise. He took several long, deep breaths. He thought of that last brutal day down in the basement, let that ground his priorities.
He’d been thinking all along that he was balancing on a high wire, that he had mastered the art of living in the skies. Now he knew that he’d fallen a very long time ago. He just hadn’t noticed until the ground came into focus.
When he got back to work, he was calm.
* * *
The single blessing of the day was that he only saw Brogan once, in passing, and Brogan didn’t see him. It was Wiley and Dillon who escorted Embry and Joel to Embry’s apartment. He was beyond grateful for that. He didn’t think he could do this if he had to see the pain he was causing.
* * *
Joel was on him almost the second they were through the door. They kissed, Embry returning it curiously, wondering if he’d end up killing the man in the next few minutes, but by the time he handed Joel a condom, he realized he was going to be fine. He had ice water in his veins. His chest was a stone. He might never breathe again, but then, he didn’t need to. He wasn’t a person anymore, not really. Just a thing, a thing that moved and smiled and gasped in the right places.
Joel was too eager to notice that Embry couldn’t have gotten hard if his life depended on it. His hand clamped down on the large, purpling mark Embry had created earlier by slamming a heavy paperweight against those three small bruises. Embry was pushed onto his hands and knees. If it hurt, he didn’t feel it. He stared at his pillow, barely aware of Joel behind him, pumping inside him, and let himself fade away.
* * *
The door had barely swung shut behind Joel before he slipped back into his clothes. He moved cloud-like, his body disconnected, as incorporeal as fog. It wasn’t unpleasant. He drove to Brogan’s through a night that seemed blacker than it probably was, absently wondering about the trees on either side of the road. They were old, sturdy evergreens. Strong enough to stop a car dead. Strong enough to stop all of it.
Then he was parked in front of Brogan’s house, struggling to remember how he got there and staring out the windshield at the street beyond. The asphalt was damp from an earlier rain and shiny in the glow of the porch light of the house next door. The engine ticked as it cooled. Wind rustled the branches of the nearby elms.
Trees.
There was a sharp sound to his right. A figure resolved into a familiar face when his eyes focused.
“Are you coming in?” he asked through the glass.
Embry didn’t say anything, just went inside. A weak lamp illuminated the living room, but otherwise the house was shadowed and somber in the quiet. He put down his duffel. He hadn’t noticed that he’d brought it until then.
“Do me a favor, will you?” The words seemed disembodied in the darkness, hard, unfamiliar. “Take a shower before you come to bed.”
Embry listened as if from a great distance. He didn’t move because he couldn’t remember where the bathroom was, and that was something he should know before he started walking, or he might go the wrong way. He might go someplace he wasn’t supposed to go, and then he might get kicked out. Maybe that wasn’t a bad thing, though. He could go far away and not be so angry or empty or dirty all the time.
He thought again of the trees. Which was weird, wasn’t it?
It wasn’t like one day someone was thinking about work and friends and things and then the next day they were thinking about what trees could do to cars and deciding that trees were nice things after all.
“Embry?”
Someone was touching him, tugging his face up. Joel, maybe. He should smile—his acting teacher told him that smiling relaxed others and minimized their anxiety about you. The muscles in his face didn’t move—they were detached, somehow.
“Embry? Baby?” Then arms were squeezing him. It was like being pressed against a furnace, and it was only then that he realized how cold he was. “What’s...are you... Jesus, you’re freezing. What the hell happened? Did he hurt you?”
Embry’s tongue felt thick. He didn’t answer. The voice didn’t sound mad anymore. It sounded scared.
“Hey. Can you talk to me?”
He could feel warm breath on his ear now.
“It’s okay,” Brogan said—yes, that was Brogan, don’t be stupid, Embry—rubbing his hands over Embry’s arms and shoulders. “It’s all right. You’re safe now. I’m not angry. It’s okay. Come back to me. Where’s your coat? It’s March, you nut. You can’t run around without a coat.”
“Sorry,” Embry whispered.
Brogan seemed to know that he wasn’t talking about outerwear, because he said, “Shh, it’s okay. I’m okay. I didn’t know what it did to you. We’ll figure it out. Just come back to me.”
Embry wasn’t sure what that meant. How could he come back when he was here already? It was too much for him to figure out now—he was light as vapor. He was aware of the cold now that Brogan had pointed it out, and he leaned into Brogan’s arms, letting that big, warm body thaw the ice.
“That’s it. Wake up for me, baby.” Brogan dropped kisses along Embry’s ear and cheek and neck, worried little kisses, and then he was pulling Embry along somewhere, into a much brighter room.
Bathroom, he registered. Right. Brogan wanted him to take a shower, to get Joel off of him. Embry was dirty enough that it seemed a good idea. He fumbled at his clothes. Brogan helped.
“We’ve got to get you warm,” Brogan was saying.
“And clean,” Embry added, then laughed, low and harsh, because that was impossible.
“Hey,” Brogan whispered, tipping Embry’s face up to his once more. Embry could see him now, see the crease between his eyebrows and the lines around his mouth, which was thin and pinched. Fear. “We’ll fix it. There’s nothing we can’t fix, okay?” Brogan pressed a gentle kiss against Embry’s mouth.
Embry started to shake.
“Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t...” Brogan sounded horrified now. “Fuck, Embry, what did he do to you?”
“Nothing,” Embry said. It was hoarse and barely audible, but Brogan heard. “I don’t kn-know why I-I’m shaking l-like this.”
“Does this always happen after?”
“N-not like th-this.”
“Just since me?”
“I didn’t f-feel b-b-bad about it b-before. Not like th-this.”
“Okay. Breathe. Come on, let’s shower.” Brogan guided him into the tub, under the spray, which was painfully hot. A second later he crowded in behind Embry, naked and big and gentle, holding him close. He kept holding him until the shaking stopped, whispering reassuring things into Embry’s ear. When Embry managed to turn around, Brogan picked up the soap and began to wash him.
“What happened to your hip?” he asked, going still. “Did he—”
“I did it,” Embry explained wearily. He didn’t want to talk about it.
&nbs
p; “You—Jesus, never mind. Tomorrow.”
Embry was overwhelmed with sudden gratitude, and he hugged Brogan around the waist. “You don’t hate me?”
“No, baby. You scared me pretty good there, though.”
“Sorry.” His breathing hitched, and for the first time in years, important words came out of him of their own volition, words that came from deep inside, even if he wasn’t sure why. “I kept thinking about trees.”
“Trees? What about them?”
No small wonder that Brogan sounded bewildered—Embry couldn’t make sense of it himself. “I don’t know,” he said, disappointed as the words dried up. “Forget it.”
When they were done and all traces of Joel’s touch had been erased from Embry’s body—well, except for the film of filth that had seeped into his skin, which no amount of soap would get rid of—they dried off and went to Brogan’s bed. Embry climbed in naked, ignoring Brogan’s offer of pajamas, and waited until Brogan slipped in beside him, wrapping Embry in his squid-like hold once more.
Eventually Brogan said, “You were sitting out there in the car for twenty minutes before I came out to get you.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t know where I got the idea that it was easy for you. I’m sort of relieved that it isn’t, but I don’t want you to go through this, either. You know. This whole, um, fugue thing? Or maybe that’s the wrong word. I don’t know.” He sounded awkward, perhaps even embarrassed, which was new. Embry had seen him in all sorts of moods by now, but it was rare that Brogan couldn’t find words. Embry cuddled in closer to soothe him—he knew what it felt like not to be able to explain things that mattered.
“Do you need anything?” Brogan asked.
“Just you,” he whispered.
“Not going anywhere,” Brogan said, and kissed him. It was easy, tender, and Embry was responding before he realized it. Brogan’s touch fixed what the shower couldn’t.
“We don’t have to,” Brogan said. Embry went still, and Brogan added, “I want you, Embry, I do, so stop thinking crazy things. You’ve had a hard night, and you don’t have to make anything up to me. If you want to sleep or whatever, that’s...whatever you want, I can do.”
