Going Up!

To anyone who has ever watched an old movie, and wanted to live in it. And to Mate, who watches old movies.

O
NCE
UPON
a time, there was a prince who lived in a tower. He had been born to a king and a queen in the kingdom of San Francisco, and he was raised by nannies and boarding schools. He was a good child. He did everything he was told. He never questioned his world, and his rebellions, on the whole, were very, very small.

He worked hard, earned his law degree, and made a life defending the weak and downtrodden, while he enjoyed a privileged life atop the tallest tower of the kingdom.

But although there was no snow in his kingdom, there were chilly bay breezes, and they left his heart cold, oh, so very cold….

Z
ACH
D
RISCOLL
sipped his champagne and looked around him. His parents’ annual Christmas party seemed to be in full swing: the chandelier was dusted, the galleria ballroom glittered with tasteful silver decorations, and his secretary, Leah, was flirting with the up-and-coming young president of the local chamber of commerce.

Fortunately for Leah’s fun, she didn’t know he was gay.

Zach knew Angelo Fitzsimmons was gay—but Angelo didn’t know Zach knew. It was a sad fact that Zach owed pretty much every decent sexual encounter he’d ever had to a flier on “escort services” that Angelo had left in a bathroom stall when Zach was still in college.

Zach figured that if the firm was discreet enough for Angelo with his budding political career, it was discreet enough for a union lawyer who only showed up to these things for his parents.

Oh, and speaking of….

“She’s charming, Zach. It’s about time you settled down and brought a date to one of our parties.”

“Hi, Mother,” he said, pursing his lips in a really horrible approximation of a smile. “We’re not dating. She’s my secretary—she does a really good job. I figured she deserved a perk.”

“So you brought your secretary to a fundraiser?” His mother…. God. She looked forty, was closer to sixty-five, and could ooze disdain with a few choice words. Right now, she needed a little sponging off at the edges.

Zach looked over at Leah, who was wearing a red crushed-velveteen dress that left one shoulder bare and sported gold spangles up the split sides. Her dusky skin and sturdy, wide-hipped body looked lush and sensual under that textured fabric, and he only wished he could appreciate that. She’d dyed her hair Christmas red to match, worn gold bangles in her updo, and was currently trying to teach Angelo the Harlem shuffle.

“Yes,” he said, smiling a little. He didn’t joke with Leah, or get too personal with her, but he sure did admire the hell out of her. She’d started off the job wearing black suits and black shoes, and had kept her normally straight black hair cut short and practical. In the past three years since he’d started the firm and hired five more lawyers and three more paralegals, she had, one tiny bit at a time, let little bits of the real Leah shine through.

First it was fuchsia or lime-colored shirts under her business suit. Then it was fan
tastic
shoes to match the shirts.

Then it was suits to match the shoes.

Then it was hair to match the whole shebang.

And while her wardrobe expanded, her sarcasm also began to expand in depth, breadth, and sheer breathtaking scope. “What, you didn’t finish that file before it’s due, Mr. Driscoll? I’m suspecting you stopped to take a crap sometime this weekend—shame on you!”

Zach hadn’t known how to respond at first. He’d never been proficient in sarcasm, or in any of the more salient social skills such as conversation, eye contact, or generally wanting to get to know his fellow human beings. He’d simply grunted and walked into his office, wondering what to say.

But over the last six months, that sarcasm had started to feel like overtures of friendship. When he’d gotten the invitation to the party stressing the need for a plus-one, he told Leah he’d spring for the dress, and, well, there they were.

“Do you think that’s appropriate?” his mother asked, not smiling at all, and Zach watched Angelo actually grace Leah with a real smile, one that didn’t seem as constipated and as cramped as Zach felt most of the time.

“I think something needed to happen,” he said quietly. “And she’s having a lovely time.”

Some flashes went off, and Zach figured that moment exhausted his family time for the rest of the year as his mother stood up and left. Zach watched Leah dance like she was Cinderfuckingella (her word, when he’d given her the credit card) and then he looked up into the windows that surrounded the high ceiling of the ballroom. It was raining, and in the cutting silver light from the galleria, the rain looked like slivers of crystal. Like wishing stars.

I wish a prince would rescue me,
he thought, half in whimsy and half in despair. Silly wish, right? His parents were rich, and he was a lawyer. Wasn’t he the prince?
Okay, then. I wish a knight would rescue the prince in the tower.

In the distance he heard Leah laugh like a kid in a playground, and he went to tell her that he’d leave her the town car and take a cab home. He knew enough about fairy tales to know that the knight in shining armor never really did show up at the ball.

Z
ACH
LIVED
in the penthouse because his dad owned the building. It was that easy.

Of course, law school at Stanford hadn’t been that easy, establishing his own practice hadn’t been easy, and keeping his relationships to the guys from the escort service wasn’t particularly easy on him either.

But Zach had always been good at putting a slick face on things.

He got up in the morning and put on his wool suit—and in San Francisco, it was always a wool suit—with his bright patent leather shoes and his crispy starched collars and hundred-dollar ties. He shaved and slicked back his dark hair, made sure his eyebrows were tweezed and his face was moisturized, and generally ensured he looked and smelled like a man who could protect your future.

He’d been the same way as a kid, except he hadn’t had to tweeze his eyebrows.

When he was a kid, his father and mother had insisted on hygiene, and so had his nannies, but the resulting behaviors were neat, orderly habits of mind and he wasn’t going to discard them just because there was a sort of echoing, vaultlike quality to all of his childhood memories.

And he figured, after that childhood, living in the nice penthouse of Driscoll Towers in the middle of downtown was a perk. He’d take what he could get. Hiding his sex life from his parents wasn’t such a big price to pay, and really? They lived in a mansion down on the peninsula, so about an hour of commute time separated them from him and the guy he’d paid to leave before midnight. Not that there were that many of
those,
but a guy had to be touched, right? That wasn’t so bad, to be touched?

But certainly not in an express elevator in the middle of a soulless January.

Which was currently breaking down. The cab lurched to a halt between the nineteenth and twentieth floor, and then, just as Zach was hitting the button for maintenance, it dropped half a floor and the doors opened.

Zach got out of the elevator on the nineteenth floor, absolutely bemused. He didn’t even know the express elevator could
open
in this part of the complex. He got out and turned around, seeing there was a bank of elevator doors instead of just the one like he was used to. He thought,
Hunh?
but hit the button to the hopefully
working
elevator, and got in when the doors opened.

The elevator stopped at the fifteenth floor, to let in a teenage girl in bright-pink spandex with a matching iPod who ignored him, and then at the fourteenth floor, where the doors opened and then started to shut again.

“Wait! Wait! I didn’t think it was going to open so soon!” The guy was running, and Zach was in the back corner behind the teenager, so he couldn’t stop the doors either. The kid—he looked like a kid—who stopped the doors and opened them again, wore cowboy boots and leather chaps and a pink-striped oxford shirt and a really revoltingly large fake-Stetson hat. He had kind of a long neck, a really prominent jaw, a smattering of freckles still on his cheeks, and teeth that barely escaped being bucked.

And curly yellow-brown hair.

And really blue eyes.

And not an ounce of embarrassment for skating in through the door at the last minute, stumbling past the girl and pitching into Zach’s arms.

“Sorry ’bout that!” he burbled, straightening himself and then straightening his hat. He arranged a scuffed leather satchel over his hip, and got a tighter hold on the peacoat he’d obviously brought to ward against the cold San Francisco morning. The doors were still open, because sometimes they did that, and the staff complained about it going slow and the tenants said things about it being haunted by the ghost of the bachelor who had died on the twenty-second floor and who had been so lonely his cat had eaten his face.

Zach pretended none of that was actually happening because even though he didn’t own a cat, he didn’t want to think of his face being eaten. So he didn’t think about his face being eaten. He just scooted around the teenaged girl, leaned forward and pressed the “close” key, and mumbled, “No problem” so the boy didn’t think it was totally okay to go rocketing into a stranger’s arms.

“Yeah, well, I’m still sorry,” the kid said, tilting his hat up. Zach had no choice. He looked up from the control board into those plasma-blue eyes, and the kid grinned. He had the slightest space between his teeth, which made Zach think that maybe his parents hadn’t had good health insurance, and that made him feel bad.

All his own teeth were capped, because six years of braces hadn’t been enough and his smile had been… well, it was perfect now, and that’s what mattered.

“That’s okay,” he said, a little more clearly, and he quirked his lips up for good measure. “Uhm, going on a round-up?”

The guy’s face split into a grin. “Substitute teaching in seventh grade. They didn’t give me a cattle prod so I figured this would have to do.”

“That’s… you do that
voluntarily
?” The thought of facing a battalion of sugar-crazed grunion made Zach’s well-worked abdomen muscles roll tightly. “You don’t look old enough to be in
college
!”

He laughed. Not a polite “you just insulted me so I’m brushing this off” laugh, but a full-stomached laugh, like what Zach had just said was really fucking funny.

“I’m twenty-six!”

Ding!

The elevator opened into the lobby then, and Zach watched the boy—guy, man, crap—stride off into the shiny, fogless day, struggling into his battered peacoat as he went.

Zach followed him, feeling bemused. He didn’t see which way the guy turned, and so he went his usual right, because it was twelve blocks to his office building and he walked it every day, wielding his briefcase like a weapon against the hordes on the crowded sidewalk. The bay wind scalpeled its way through his wool trench coat, but he didn’t let that stop him, and he didn’t resort to huddling and blowing on his hands, either. He just kept up that same relentless pace that allowed him to push his law firm into success, that allowed him to gut school districts and corporations that tried to treat their employees like crap, and that allowed him to subvert every desire he’d ever had for a warm and comfortable life in favor of the thing his parents had decided he should have instead.

He strode into his office with an expressionless face, because that’s how he always walked through his office.

Leah smiled brightly at him like she did every day.

“Hello, Mr. Driscoll, are we having a good day, Mr. Driscoll, I have your coffee waiting for you, Mr. Driscoll, all of your appointments are on your computer, Mr. Driscoll—”

Her perky sarcasm usually washed over him like acid rain. After those first conservative months, Zach had come to treasure the punk rock diva who couldn’t sing, who wore matching lime-green Converses with her lime-green-and-black suit, and who harangued Zach about his lack of personal life like she had a right.

Her job performance was
spectacular.

And she thought she was funny.

Usually Zach tolerated her, but today, as he was walking through the lobby, he had a thought of her in her Christmas dress, flirting with a man just to see him smile, and then a vision of a sort of geeky-looking teacher, dressing up to impress middle schoolers he might never see again.

It was an awful lot of effort to go to, this effort to make people respond to you, wasn’t it?

He turned to her and spared her a brief smile. “Thank you, Leah—I definitely appreciate the coffee.”

Leah’s mouth dropped and her stunned silence actually made him a little sad. Jesus, Zach—way to fail Humanity 101.

Maybe tomorrow, he’d bring her dessert coffee and nut bread. She really did try hard, didn’t she?