Better Off

by Tanya Chris

  It was just that they would see Hailey as a less good choice than Lauren, as something of a downgrade. Hailey’s gender would be part of that, but the lesser part. Lauren had had connections, aspirations, a career on the rise. Hailey had a nose ring, flamboyant clothes, and a very left-leaning attitude. The MacPhersons leaned left too, but cautiously left, a left that would in no way deprive them of their own comfortable privilege, whereas Hailey had lured Mac out of his loft and into Ball’s End—not even temporarily, as Mac had previously told his mother. But perhaps that news could wait.

  “You’re worried about something.”

  “Wouldn’t anyone be nervous introducing their… lover to their parents?” Lover? No. Definitely not.

  “Oh my God, my parents will hate you. You’re so ‘the man.’”

  “Is that why I haven’t met them yet?”

  “You haven’t met them yet because they’re south for the winter and are too technologically illiterate to Skype, but I can’t wait until you do. Because on the one hand, they’ll hate you—I mean, not you, personally, obviously, just the concept of you—but on the other hand, they reject the notion of parental authority. I swear if I told them I was going to lick an electric fence, they’d encourage me to have my own experience with it.”

  “So they let you make your own choices even when they don’t approve of them.”

  “Right, like college. And registering for the draft. And getting student loans. Almost all the choices I’ve made, honestly, although they liked the bookstore.”

  “Their disapproval doesn’t bother you?”

  “Considering the choices they’ve made? No.”

  That was the difference, then. Mac couldn’t fault his own parents’ choices. His parents were admirable, the choices they made responsible. They’d encouraged him to follow in their footsteps, and he had. A school record of excellent grades had led to a business career of uninterrupted success. Marrying Lauren, continuing to lead C&G to greater profits—those were choices his parents would approve of. The things he had C&G doing to please Hailey? Hailey himself? Much less so. His parents weren’t unreasonable. All they’d ever asked from him was that he do his best, but now they might think he hadn’t.

  No, fuck that. He had done his best. Hailey was the best. And if his parents didn’t see that, then… then they were wrong. That was all. Just like Hailey’s parents had been wrong about him going to college. Sometimes parents were wrong.

  Mac bundled Hailey into one of his own coats, because the single coat Hailey owned wasn’t worthy of the name. The overcoat was a little too bulky and a little too short and gave Mac a happy possessive feeling that he carried with him as they walked side by side down to the alley to pick up his car.

  His parents still owned the spacious house out in the burbs where he’d grown up, but they spent most of their time at their uptown apartment these days because it kept his mother close to her charity activities and his father close to his business pursuits. So it was only a short drive over to their secured building, where a valet took Mac’s keys and a doorman vetted them before allowing them up the elevator.

  Julia-Louise answered the door, giving Mac another two minutes of breathing room, but by the time they’d made it through cocktails and into the dining room, he couldn’t remember why he’d been so worried in the first place. If there’d been an initial discreetly raised eyebrow over Hailey’s appearance, all eyebrows quickly settled.

  Hailey squealed over his mother’s art collection, garnering her good opinion of him with his good opinion of her taste. Mac’s father was standoffish until they got into a discussion of the relative merits of Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy. It was Hailey’s refusal to back down that the elder MacPherson seemed to admire there. That, and perhaps the fact that Hailey knew who both those people were, which Mac definitely didn’t.

  It wasn’t until they were sipping coffee in the living room after dinner that things got sticky.

  “And how long do you think you’ll be living in the south end, Gregory?”

  “Um.” He shot a glance over at Hailey. It was either tell his mother the truth and freak her out or lie to her and freak out Hailey. “There’s no particular end date,” he hedged. “We’ve got a six-month lease now, but there’s an option to renew.” Probably an endless option to renew, given that they were renting “the murder house” as Alexander gleefully called it. There was definitely no need to tell his mother that part.

  “Hailey might open a new business in the area once we get through with the revitalization, so it makes sense to keep him there. He prefers not to own a car.” Which was a diplomatic way of saying that Hailey couldn’t afford one and Mac still hadn’t talked him into having one bought for him.

  “There are car services, Gregory,” his father pointed out. “I work downtown, but do I live downtown? Of course not.”

  “You can’t really be part of a neighborhood without living in it,” Hailey said. “Commuting in wouldn’t be the same.”

  “It’s so true,” Julia-Louise said in a rush. “I’ve been thinking about moving back to Ballhaven myself. I know the drive isn’t that long, but it’s so much easier not to make it, especially when the weather starts to get bad. Speaking of which, did I see snow in the forecast for Christmas? Maybe I’ll spend the night here Christmas Eve, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course we don’t mind,” Mac’s mother said automatically.

  “Your mother is concerned for your safety,” his father said, refusing to let the matter drop.

  “Why’s that?” Hailey asked. Mac shot a quick “help me” glance at Julia-Louise.

  “Did I mention I’ve been going to a book club at Hailey’s store?” Julia-Louise said brightly, talking over their father’s allusion to a recent news story about drug-related violence. It wasn’t like the higher incidence of drive-by shootings in Ball’s End could be refuted, but neither could it be changed, not here in the MacPherson living room. “We’re reading the most interesting book now.”

  “I think you did mention it,” Mac’s mother said. “Are the gangs very active where you live, Hailey?”

  “There aren’t any gangs, as such. Just kids who’re lost and grown-ups taking advantage of them. They mostly hurt each other.”

  “You can understand why we don’t want our son caught in the crossfire.”

  “No one wants their children caught in the crossfire. Not the parents who live in Ball’s End either.”

  “One hardly knows how to help them,” Mac’s mother said.

  “As Hailey said, they bring it on themselves.” Mac’s father twisted Hailey’s words with his own interpretation. “But as far as you go, Gregory, and really, Julia-Louise, being in a neighborhood like that, and at night too—”

  Mac rubbed at his temples, trying to come up with a way to stop this conversation. Julia-Louise’s attempts at helping had only gotten her dragged into it with him, which she probably hated him for.

  It was Hailey who interceded by putting a warm hand on Mac’s furrowed brow. “Have you got a headache?”

  “A little.”

  “Because the topic is too heavy,” his mother said immediately. “We should know better than to talk politics after dinner. But of course we worry.”

  “It’s fine, Mom,” Julia-Louise said, and Mac offered a weak smile of agreement. “I’m careful, and Gregory’s intimidating enough to take care of himself.”

  “Not against a bullet,” their father grumbled, but his mother hushed him with a look, and he settled back into his chair to nurse his coffee.

  Julia-Louise managed to get a discussion going about her most recent book club book—a subject everyone in the room could weigh in on except Mac, who read very little considering he lived with the owner of a bookstore. He let the conversation flow around him, ruminating on how he was the exact opposite of intimidating when it came to his parents. Julia-Louise was far better at disobeying them. He’d never had any practice.

  It was past ten when th
ey finished their coffee, plenty late enough to take Hailey home before another conversational bomb got triggered. He pleaded the headache he’d claimed earlier, feeling like a coward, but a coward who would live to fight another day.

  “Will you come for Christmas dinner?” his mother asked Hailey as they made their goodbyes in the foyer. She knew he’d be at loose ends since they’d covered the fact that his parents “traveled.” She was probably imagining a double-decker bus with mechanical bump-outs and a second bus for an accompanying personal chef, but Mac would worry about the collision of his parents and Hailey’s parents later. For now he was glad she liked Hailey enough to invite him back.

  “That would be great.” Hailey gave her a hug, followed by a handshake for his father and a second hug for Julia-Louise. “Love you,” he told Julia-Louise as he released her.

  “That should probably be my line,” Mac said.

  “As if.” But Julia-Louise had a hug for him too.

  Outside, Hailey huddled into his borrowed coat as they waited for the valet to bring around the car. Mac flipped the collar up on it to keep his neck warm.

  “I think that went pretty well,” he said. Not perfectly, but well.

  “I’m glad. I could tell how important it was to you. Your parents really love you, Greg.”

  “I know my parents love me.” Of course he did.

  “Then why are you so afraid of their disapproval? Do you think they’ll stop?”

  He was saved from having to answer by the valet.

  “You know you don’t have to do anything to be worthy of love,” Hailey said when Mac still hadn’t answered a few blocks later. “You’re their son. You’re worthy of their love just by existing. Love that’s contingent on what you do isn’t exactly love anyway.”

  Right, right. Everyone was worthy of love.

  “I love you too, by the way.”

  And Hailey loved everyone. Trouble was, Mac didn’t want Hailey to love everyone. He wanted Hailey to love him. And for that to happen, he was pretty sure that regardless of what Hailey said, he needed to do things—things that would show Hailey he was the kind of man he could love. One who was philanthropic and tolerant, one who thought of others first to the point of selling the clothes off his back, one who could stand up to his parents instead of looking to his little sister for help.

  And Mac was trying—God knew he was trying—but he was still a long way off.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Declan barged into Mac’s office, ignoring the fact that he was in conference with Audra. Mac held up a finger to halt his impending tirade, and Declan turned his back with a scowl and strode over to the windows, nominally giving them space to finish.

  “Nice work identifying funding sources for these initiatives,” Mac told Audra, “but we need to make sure the initiatives will actually be helpful. I’d like to bring Elisa in on it.”

  “What are you seeing her role as?”

  “Let’s make one for her. Community analyst, something like that. Draft me a proposal to include at least one community analyst on every project going forward—someone from the neighborhood who can liaise with the community on what they need. We don’t know what we don’t know.”

  “Got it.”

  Mac made a note to talk to HR about Elisa’s promotion and the subsequent need to hire a new receptionist as Audra collected her things and left the office.

  No sooner had she crossed the threshold than Declan was on him.

  “Want to tell me why C&G is making a loan to the Catholic church? Last I heard, they have plenty of money.”

  “The diocese in Ballhaven doesn’t. We’re lending them the funds to get St. Theresa’s roof repaired before it collapses.”

  “We were planning to tear the place down, remember? It’s a ramshackle antiquity no one uses. Even the diocese doesn’t want it.”

  “People do use it.” Mac walked past them every morning and evening. “And it’s not that the diocese doesn’t want it. They just can’t afford the repairs on it.”

  “Which is why they’ll never pay back this loan, and you know it. Maybe someone’s using the church, but not enough someones are using it to pay its bills. You’re throwing this money away.”

  “Well, it’s my money to throw. Are you going to sit down?”

  Declan didn’t normally need an invitation, but he was pacing the width of Mac’s office without his usual languor. “Whether or not this is your money is debatable, Mac.”

  “I’m the sole owner of C&G, and the loan is happening outside of the Ball’s End project.”

  “All right, let’s talk about the Ball’s End project, then, because another interesting request came through legal. It appears that we’re now buying the deserted property at 983 Main Street.”

  “I’m working on a separate set of investors for that,” Mac clarified. “We’ll tear it down, then transfer ownership of the lot to the Phase II project.” He intended to put a parking garage under the new building and reserve the top floor for himself and Hailey. Not the whole top floor, because Hailey would squawk, but a sizable chunk of it. “Not having an abandoned building in the neighborhood will increase property values, plus Phase II saves money by buying an empty lot.”

  “I’m aware that it’s in the best interests of the project.”

  “Then what are you so pissed about? Sit down, for God’s sake.”

  With a huff, Declan did, his body slouching into a more familiar posture despite the way he still radiated tension.

  “If you want out of the project, I’ll buy you out.” As strained as things had gotten between him and Declan, Mac didn’t want to abandon the friendship entirely. Maybe if Declan didn’t have a financial interest, he’d come around.

  “I don’t want out of the project. It’s not my wallet I’m worried about, it’s you. The amount of money you’re dropping into this relationship, the potential hit to your reputation and standing—it’s unfathomable. What’s it going to take to wake you up from this trance you’re in?”

  “I don’t want to wake up.” He remembered Hailey asking Why can’t you understand that I like living in Ball’s End? with a new understanding. Why couldn’t Declan understand that he was happy with Hailey?

  “Mac, Mac.” Declan hunched forward in his chair, appealing to Mac with his whole body. “These aren’t decisions you would’ve made before you met Hailey. You’re Gregory MacPherson II. What will your parents think? Is Hailey who they’d want as a son-in-law?”

  “My parents liked him.”

  “They’ve met him?”

  “Of course they’ve met him. I’m serious about him, Declan. I don’t know how to be more clear about that.”

  “Fine, fine. They’re open-minded people. Good for them. But they can’t approve of you moving to Ball’s End.”

  “They’re not crazy about that part,” he admitted.

  “So it’s true.” Declan slumped back in his seat in defeat. “You really rented a one-bedroom, fifth-floor apartment in Ball’s End. I guess I can’t accuse Hailey of being after your money if you’re moving into a slum with him instead of him moving into an east side loft with you. But why did I hear about it from your receptionist? I never see you anymore except when you’re grunting next to me on the treadmill, and even then you’re not talking. Not about the important things, obviously.”

  “Because you disapprove. Why would I talk to you about what I’m doing when you disapprove of it? You come charging in here yelling about the decisions I’m making for my own company, my own money, my own housing situation, accuse Hailey of being a gold digger and a bad influence, suggest that my parents will disinherit me for associating with him, and you wonder why I’m not consulting you? The answer’s self-evident.”

  Someone scurried past the open doorway, making Mac realize he’d raised his voice high enough to carry into the lobby. He’d also raised his ass off the seat of his chair. He dropped back into it and ran a frustrated hand through his hair, fixing Declan with a glare that s
uggested he could leave at any time.

  “Touché,” Declan said instead of stalking off in fury. “Point taken. But from where I’m sitting, you’re making a lot of changes to accommodate him, and he’s doing nothing for you in return.”

  “Okay, that’s definitely not true.”

  “What, then? How great are these blowjobs that they’re worth buying him a building so you can tear it down?”

  “Pretty fucking great, actually, but that’s not the point. I love him. I love him, and he makes me want to do better. If he were asking for gold watches and Caribbean vacations, it would be one thing, but he’s not. He’s asking me to help people who need help. And the thing is, I can help. I could’ve been helping all along. Is it so wrong that he’s made me aware of that?”

  “Don’t pretend you’re doing this from the goodness of your own greedy heart. You’re doing it to please Hailey, full stop.”

  “Fine, I admit it. It’s for Hailey. But you know what? It’s kind of nice having a purpose.” He’d always had goals and achievements, awards and rewards, but there’d never been a point to what he was doing other than meeting expectations for what he ought to be doing. “Hailey can take care of the world, and I’ll take care of him. I’m fine with that. He’s an amazing human being, better than I deserve, and if you keep talking him down, I’m going to keep withdrawing.”

  “Then I won’t keep talking him down, because your friendship means more to me than the Ball’s End project or C&G. But I have to disagree with one thing you just said.” Declan held up a hand when Mac opened his mouth to argue. “You do deserve him. If he’s who you want, then you deserve him. Because you’re an amazing human being too, and I don’t think you’re giving yourself enough credit here.”

  “Funny, that’s what Hailey would say.”

  “Then why are you working so hard to prove yourself to him?”

  “Hailey would say that about anyone. We’re all sort of equally lovable in his worldview. Even you.”

  “He’s mad at me, huh?”