by P D Singer
“The rent is your problem, not mine. I won’t be there past the end of November.” Ricky looked sideways at his caricature and decided to add more hair. “Sad, though, to write those checks, bleed out forty-four hundred bucks a month for the next two years.” Gloating rather than sympathy colored his tone, letting Edgar hear how little he really grieved. “But you’re retired now, you have lots of time to wade through possible tenants—you’ll find someone.” He paused to let Edgar contemplate the joys of trying to sort out the trustworthy from the scoundrel. “Eventually.” He debated adding ways to cut that search short, all with fees attached. “Have fun.”
Another round of cheering made Ricky look up. The traders and analysts were certainly having fun. He heard “Sixty-three!” as part of the hubbub, which was louder now. Geoff had come in while Ricky wasn’t watching and was pounding Jon’s back and hooting with the rest over his investment’s meteoric rise.
“What’s happening?” Edgar demanded, though his right to know had evaporated with his ownership.
“It will be in the quarterly report.” Ricky would give up nothing. “Goodbye, Edgar.”
“Wait!” The screech made Ricky pause before he could disconnect. “Damn it, wait! Please.” That last word had to come with a cost, and had Edgar not said it, Ricky would have snapped the phone shut. “Look, tell me, don’t tell me, but was it Geoff’s bonds?” His eagerness to know was pathetic, his lack of information because he was no longer on the inside. “I heard there was an offer—” Not on CNN, though. Ricky’d hidden the remote.
“Might have been. Read the Wall Street Journal tomorrow. Bye, Edgar.” Ricky started to fold the phone.
“Wait!” Edgar yelped, louder than before. “Ricky, you could sublet the place! You’re reliable!”
“Very.” Ricky added a flourish to his drawing, nasty webbed feet poking out of the toad’s trousers. “But I don’t like the price or the landlord.” He didn’t take the phone from his ear, wondering what kind of offer Edgar would make.
“You can stay on the old rent,” Edgar wheedled. “I’ll eat the difference—that check for next month should cover, since I won’t be here.”
“Funny. That check is my security deposit that you seem to have taken over. Forget it. It will only cost you around a hundred grand to get out of the lease. You’ve already taken possession.” Ricky’s visit to the leasing office had been a quick refresher in tenant law. “Write them a check.”
Give them a kidney, he might as well have said.
“You don’t want to move, not really. It’s close to the good restaurants and convenient to the office….”
“You have one last chance, Edgar.” Ricky sat up straight, his motion and the name attracting attention from the others. A predator’s show of teeth and a quick wave drew a few near, Jon and Dwight the closest. “Make it good, for making me paint over that portrait.” Jon looked thoughtful, the rest puzzled.
Edgar started to speak, but Ricky interrupted him. “Make it really good. For all those ‘moments of my time’, mine and everyone else’s. Or write a check.” He’d looked for a way to strike back, had chosen the wrong way before, a way that would hurt others, but this pain would be Edgar’s alone, in small monthly bloodlettings or one substantial hemorrhage. Ricky waited to hear how the blood would flow.
Twice Edgar started to speak, and then he cleared his throat. “You sublet the apartment from me—” He stopped.
Ricky wouldn’t prompt him; the first to speak would lose. He drew an anvil dropping on the toad’s head, getting a muffled laugh from his audience, who were torn between the little drama at the desk and the ever-increasing numbers on the Bloomberg.
“At—at—” Deciding what number was low enough for Ricky to accept yet high enough to live with had to be killing him. Edgar choked out the words. “Twenty-five hundred.”
Ricky stayed silent. Let the bastard twist in the wind for a moment, wondering if he’d guessed too high. Mere money wouldn’t begin to pay for all Edgar owed. Let his gut knot the way his junior staff’s had, waiting to find out who would be the day’s victim.
“Sublet, $2500 a month for two years. You understand that you have no right to come through that door for anything except brief and reasonable inspections, arranged ahead of time?” So Edgar opted for little and often—every check he wrote would gall him. Ricky would enjoy rubbing Edgar’s nose in a $1,900 deficit on the twenty-ninth of every month. “And that you are on the hook for the full $4400, no matter what?”
“Yes,” Edgar croaked. “I understand.”
“We use my lease contract.” Ricky jabbed his pen into the toad. “This is the one and only time it’s ever been a pleasure doing business with you, schmuck.”
He snapped his phone closed, and the cheering erupted. “You get him!” “Make him pay!” “Yeah!” Only Dwight stayed silent, I wish… all over his face.
Pramiti yelled over everyone.
“Eight million at 65!”
“What’s our exit strategy?” Jon looked to Geoff, but his hand still rested on Ricky’s shoulder, where he’d planted his opinion of Edgar’s takedown.
“We’re sitting on a total of $43 million in face value. That’s too big to move as a lump.” Geoff’s brows knitted. “The price will come way down if we try.”
“Sixty-three, actually. You missed what I bought this morning.” Geoff goggled—he’d make a good gecko figure. “Then in the parcels we bought it?” Jon suggested. Everyone’s eyes, including Ricky’s, fixed on the partners.
Geoff nodded. “You want to go first?”
The squeeze on Ricky’s shoulder felt fine. “I will, because I think it’s still on the way up, and I want to hit the market top for what we bought today.” Jon took the offered phone and left his hand right where it was during the call, selling $10 million of GlobalSky at 64 bid, for a profit that would have sent the two of them running to the couch in the washroom had it been six weeks earlier. Now, a palm on his shoulder was all he got, but it was enough to leave Ricky a little weak in the knees.
“Ten down.” Jon took the few steps to the group Bloomberg, and Ricky’s skin went cold in the absence of his touch. “Think we can try a bigger chunk?” He turned his back, and Ricky could only get up to stand behind him at the Bloomberg.
“We’ve seen lots up to twenty-five go by,” Dwight said. “It didn’t pull down the price any.”
“I’m going to hold for another half hour.” Kate had stopped twirling some time back, but her predatory look had returned. “You guys go ahead. This could get to 70.”
“I’m not going to be greedy. Geoff?” Jon gave a theatrical wave at the phone. “After you.”
“Thanks, I believe I will.” He dialed—shortly after that, $18 million of problem bonds that had kept Geoff locked in a bathroom with Ricky for a jailer were on the block, at 65 bid, 67 ask.
“You really think this could go as high as 70?” Jon cast worried eyes at Kate. “It’s gotten high enough to spook me.” A number of small trades had come through, but the price hadn’t twitched in several transactions. Kate pursed her lips, thinking.
“We wouldn’t mind if you took the profits on the group transactions now, Jon,” Miranda said. “Our basis is too high not to take the money and run.” Ricky nodded when Jon looked for a consensus in his traders’ faces. He’d grab the found money and call it good. Jon dialed the phone again and put it on speaker. Everyone held their breaths,
“Hey, Larry, 20 million GlobalSky.”
“Sixty-six bid, sixty-eight ask.” Larry was a bit hoarse.
“Sixty-six, selling.” Jon made his deal; Ricky could feel the dollars settling into pockets.
“You’re done!”
The silence lasted until Jon clicked the call off. “Damn, that was a quick way to make two million bucks!” Ricky cheered with the others. He was climbing back into positive ranges, and all because Jon cared enough to look after him.
“One point nine million, actually,” Iggy corrected Ricky,
his face partly squashed into Dwight’s chest.
“You are such a quant!” Ricky punched him lightly for spoiling the nice round number, and wished he dared grab Jon that same way.
Dwight twisted Iggy out of range. “He’s my quant. Quit hitting him.”
Ricky withdrew his fist abruptly—he shouldn’t punch a man who removed another rival for Jon’s attentions, though he would pick Iggy’s brain for ways to invest today’s profits. He winked at the pair and tried to get a turn hugging Jon. He had to settle for thumping Jon’s back, because Miranda wasn’t letting go.
Kate and Geoff were dancing again. “Bonds for sale! Bonds for sale!” she trilled. “I have lovely bonds for sale!”
“You’re the only one,” Geoff told the ballerina spinning under his raised arm. “And the sooner you sell them, the sooner we celebrate!”
“All right!” While Kate was on the phone discovering what prices she could get, Ricky did manage to pull Jon a step away from Miranda, pressing his back against Ricky’s chest.
“You did good,” he whispered into Jon’s ear, and then he let go, not daring to make a more affectionate display lest Jon reject even the quiet words. The look Jon threw over his shoulder the instant before he broke contact made Ricky’s heart pound, and he took his own step away before he grew so hard he made Jon notice.
“Sixty-seven selling,” Kate said in her best professional voice, and once she put the phone down, she repeated it at the top of her lungs. “Sixty-seven! I just sold 15 million bucks’ worth of bonds at 67! Woo-hoo!”
Dwight whipped his dry erase pen across the board screaming his results to the world. “Nineteen million bucks today!”
“See! I told you!” Kate hugged Geoff so tightly he grunted. “You didn’t want to sell that day! You’d have missed doubling your money!” She broke off long enough to scrawl her name all over the papers Chloe offered and barely accepted the congratulations from the others before leading Geoff off to more private celebrations on the new couch. The huge profits that had been looming all day, waiting to be realized, had to have been working on those two every bit as much as it had on Ricky, but Jon had said “no more.”
A $19 million collective profit wouldn’t change his mind. Ricky hoped he could make other arguments, but Jon didn’t leave the trading floor, glad-handing with Corbin, Miranda, and the rest. Ricky stayed too, and high-fived, hip-bumped, and crowed with the others. Dwight stuck close to Iggy, exulting but slightly mournful. Of course. They had no place to go.
“You can use my office,” Ricky murmured during a second round of hand-slaps. When he turned their way again, his door was closed.
“WE ARE in here why?” Iggy looked around Ricky’s office, which contained the standard desk, chairs, a table piled high with papers, and a window looking out at the building across the street.
Dwight shut the door and flipped the lock. “Remember when I said working here was ‘mixed’? This is one of the good parts.” Now that he had Iggy and privacy, combined with the adrenaline from a huge profit, he didn’t quite know how to proceed. Jon’s coolness lessons had gotten him to this point, but the next steps were all his to foul up.
“I like it so far. Nobody at Araucaria ever hugged me. Of course, there was no one there I wanted to hug.”
“That’s good.” Dwight wondered if he should cross the three feet between them before or after he explained. After. Iggy might not approve. “No one is going to look for us for a while.”
“Really.” Iggy’s smile grew a bit wider. “Tell me the bad parts.”
“The worst part is no longer the boss.” He hadn’t decided what to tell Iggy about Edgar, other than “good riddance.” Glad that Ricky had shafted the old bastard, Dwight couldn’t help but be jealous of the deal Ricky’d scored. He’d give quite a lot to have a place in Manhattan to bring Iggy back to after work. “The other bad part is that everyone will assume they know what we’re doing in here.” Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.
“Because of Geoff and Kate?” Iggy asked. Dwight nodded. “What about Jon and Ricky?”
Dwight could only shrug. “They’ve both been moping around since they broke up.”
Brown eyes looked thoughtful behind the wire rims. Iggy took two steps to the door. “No matter how laid back everyone is, I don’t really want to take my clothes off.” Iggy wasn’t reaching for the doorknob now—he had wrapped both arms around Dwight’s neck and was pulling him down for a kiss! “But I don’t mind getting a bit rumpled.”
THERE was still another hour of trading before the stock exchange would close for the weekend, but the huge profits on top of the day’s tension made everyone droop a little—the festival subsided. Chloe and Vaughn plopped into chairs they hadn’t sat on since Ricky’d walked in. Corbin and Miranda headed to their offices, though they probably wouldn’t get anything done. The couples behind closed doors were the most productive members of the firm at the moment. Ricky longed to be one of them, but Jon had slipped away.
The door to the corner office was partly open. The trading floor didn’t have enough oxygen or Ricky’s chest wouldn’t expand, no matter how much his heart thumped. Peering through the gap, Ricky knew his opportunity would never be better. He pulled two sheets of paper from his inner pocket but put one back. It was there if he needed it. “Jon? Can I show you something?”
Jon rested his head on the back of the chair, as if the adrenaline was subsiding into the hangover already. “Sure. What do you have?” He sat up straight when the door clicked shut behind Ricky, and accepted the proffered sheet.
Ricky sat down hard in the guest chair, struggling to get the words out. “I hope to heaven it’s a stop-loss order.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
A STOP-LOSS order? Jon glanced over the paper, recognizing the lab report and finding the results. Good for Ricky, but—a stop-loss order? He asked the question with his eyes.
“Jon, I—there—oh, damn, I don’t know how to say this.” Ricky scrubbed his face with his hands, then ran them through his thick waves of dark hair. “Jon, it’s been almost six weeks since you said—and there hasn’t been anyone else since then, and I didn’t know any other way to help you believe that—but, Jon—” Meltingly deep brown eyes lifted to Jon’s face, and they were filled with pain. “It doesn’t really prove that, but still it’s true.”
“You’ve always been honest with me, Ricky.” Jon set the paper down. “I haven’t always liked what you’ve said, but you’ve been honest.” So this had been Ricky’s emergency appointment. “Almost six weeks is cutting it close.”
“I know.” Ricky reached into his jacket. “I have results for the only other person in that window, besides you, if you want them.”
“Anyone I know?” Jon put his hand out again, afraid of the answer.
“No one you have to see.” Ricky tendered the other sheet. “No one I want to see.”
No name, only a number, identified the subject on that sheet. “This is good news for you and him.” Jon didn’t need to see a name—he could add up the clues and was glad he’d gotten Logan out the door. “You bring this to me why?”
“You said you didn’t know how much it would hurt that we weren’t exclusive. I didn’t know, either; I didn’t understand how much I was hurting you until I had to watch you and Davis, and you weren’t even doing anything.” Ricky had gripped the edge of the desk that separated them, and his knuckles were turning white. “You weren’t seeing me. I had no right to be angry, but I was. No right to feel hurt.”
“I figured you’d soothe yourself with anyone who caught your eye.” Jon hadn’t stopped Davis from putting the flower in his buttonhole last night. He’d let Davis commit that symbolic penetration while Ricky watched. Not one of Jon’s finer moments, but he’d wanted Ricky to know what it felt like; he’d wanted to share that bit of pain. He’d had to bite his lip so many other times.
“Oh, I tried. I hit the clubs; I even got to the backroom a couple of times before calling it off. Bu
t I couldn’t. I didn’t. I even went to Sharkie’s last night and only got into a fistfight.”
The celibacy reports had stopped. Had Ricky really not resumed his screwing around? “Why?” Jon whispered.
“Because he looked like Davis—oh, Jon.” Ricky’s knuckles whitened again, and he answered the right question. “Because none of them were you. I have been such an idiot.”
“So have I.” Jon had cursed himself for a fool more than once. “I stayed with a player when I wanted one and only.” He wanted to reach out and stroke Ricky’s hands, relax them, put them against bare skin. “And when you’re feeling secure with me again, off to the clubs you’ll go?” Saying the words made it easier to leave his own hands where they were.
“No. Nobody there has one damned thing to say to me that’s worth hearing. Not one of them would piss on me if I was on fire, let alone watch out for me the way you do. I am nothing to them, and they are nothing to me. Jon—” Oh, why couldn’t Ricky have said all this a year ago? With one hand held out, palm up, Ricky went on. “Jon, if I want to go dancing, I’ll go with you. You pick the club, and we’ll wait to get naked ’til we get home, no backrooms.”
With a throat so tight that he almost couldn’t get the words out, Jon questioned what was too good to be true. “Why now?” He didn’t reach for Ricky’s outstretched hand, and after a moment, Ricky dropped it back to the desk.
“It took a smarter man than me to make me understand.” Ricky’s voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. “And I hated him for it, but Davis may have done me the biggest favor of my life by making me see that you’re—” He lifted his hand again, a small hopeless gesture. “That being with you is better than being with any other thousand men.”
Ricky might possibly have used that number as an actual count. The fist around Jon’s heart tightened.
“I shouldn’t have messed with the flowers, but I couldn’t stand it. That he was with you and I wasn’t.” Ricky tightened his lips, swaying slightly in his chair. “But what I couldn’t stand most was not being with you. Nobody else mattered.”
