His Heart's Revenge (49th Floor Novels) (6 page)

“You get that Liu account?”

Cary appreciated that Marcus was rooting for him, but he
so
didn’t want to talk about it. “Don’t know yet. He says he’s going to take his time making a decision. His son is still in Hong Kong wrapping up the head office function of one of their bigger companies, and his daughter is doing some set up here. He’s going to wait until he’s back, and the three of them will decide together.”

“So you wait,” said Marcus.

“I keep trying to impress him, but essentially, yeah.”

“So what’s got your undies in a bunch then if not Liu?”

“I’ll have you know that my undies are smooth as all get-out.” Cary tried to muster a smile. Marcus had always been like a big brother to him. Their mothers were cousins, and they were both only children, so they’d been close growing up. They’d drifted apart in recent years, since Marcus left the family fold to start his ad agency, estranging himself from his father—Cary’s uncle and former boss—in the process. But when Cary had followed in his footsteps and severed his own ties to the Rosemann patriarch and the family’s eponymous company, Marcus stepped right up to fill the big brother role again.

“Well, you could have fooled me,” Marcus said. “You’re sitting here looking like you’ve got a perma-wedgie, dude.” The bartender arrived, and Marcus ordered a beer for himself and another Manhattan for Cary. When the bartender departed, he turned, grinning. “Ah, wait! Is it man trouble?”

Cary sighed. Marcus and Cary used to be on the same page about these things. Neither of them really did relationships. Well, Cary tried, but they never stuck, and Marcus lived for the chase. So the result was they were often both on the prowl. It had brought them together, in fact. When they were younger, Marcus had, like everyone else, assumed Cary was straight. But after Cary came out—after that last summer at Camp Blue—Marcus, who was in college by then, hadn’t blinked an eye. He’d gotten none of the “but you’re so athletic” protests from his cousin that he’d had from other members of their family. In fact, Marcus, who was not yet estranged from his father at that point, had smoothed things over with the clan and had invited Cary to crash at his crappy student apartment any time he needed to. And then he and Marcus had picked up right where they left off. That Cary was officially chasing men and not women at that point never mattered to Marcus. And that meant the world to Cary. But they weren’t a demonstrative family, so he showed his appreciation by doing what he always did, giving Marcus shit like the little brother role he filled required him to.

But things had changed lately. Marcus had met Rose. It wasn’t like she had changed his personality or anything, but his cousin’s days of casual hook ups were done. He was happy—in love—which was pretty damn remarkable if you knew Marcus from before.

Suddenly, Cary didn’t feel like playing the annoying little brother, didn’t want to answer Marcus’s jests in kind. The truth was bumping up against the jokes he always had at the ready, and for once, he couldn’t bring himself to quash it. It was getting too big, as the truth had a way of doing. “I made a mistake,” he ventured.

“What else is new?” But then, swiveling to look at Cary, Marcus must have realized that he was serious. “What’s going on?”

“I know we don’t really talk about shit.” Cary said, backpedaling. It was too weird, to be doing this with Marcus. To be doing this with anyone. What had he been thinking? That they were going to hold hands and sing “Kumbaya?” That wasn’t Marcus. That wasn’t
him
. He hadn’t even done that at camp.

“Yeah, and not talking has worked really well for our family, hasn’t it?”

Cary shrugged. Even though he started it, he was suddenly afraid that if he talked about it, Marcus would somehow have the power to force him to deal with it. He picked up his cocktail and took a long drink, letting the whiskey that was its base burn down his throat.

“Anyway, we talk. Have you forgotten you’re the one who talked sense into me that day I was prepared to throw away everything with Rose?”

“Nah. You would have come to your senses eventually. I just gave you a little shove.”

“You left Rosemann Investments when my father tried pull that stunt and break up Rose and me. You left your career for me.”

Okay, apparently they were really doing this. Cary looked up from his drink and met his cousin’s eye. “No. I did it for me. You were just the catalyst.”

Marcus cleared his throat. “Still. It meant everything.”

Cary rolled his eyes. “Don’t go getting all sentimental on me now, dude.”

Marcus grinned, and they sat side by side in silence for a few moments before his cousin finally said, “So what about this mistake?”

Apparently he wasn’t being let off the hook. But that’s what he’d wanted, wasn’t it, when he started this stupid conversation? “It was a long time ago, but it’s back to bite me in the ass now.” He didn’t bother saying that it had never really left. That it never strayed far from his consciousness, as much as he tried to forget, as much as he tried to tell himself that Alex had forgotten. “It happened at camp.”

“Camp? You mean that summer camp you used to be so obsessed with?”

“Yeah. You know Alexander Evangelista?”

“I do. We did some TV spots for Dominion a few years back.” He trailed off. “Wait. Alexander Evangelista is gay, right?”

Cary nodded. “And he went to Camp Blue Lake, too.”

Marcus’s eyebrows were going to hit the ceiling if they went any higher. “You and Alexander Evangelista got together at summer camp?” He snickered. “I’m sorry. I can’t help it. It’s too funny. Everyone thought you were straight, and you were hooking up with the future CEO of Dominion Bank.”

“We didn’t hook up,” Cary said, inexplicably defensive. “We just kissed. He was kind of a nerd. The other guys picked on him. I defended him, to a certain point, until…I didn’t.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I made out with him, and then I threw him under the bus when the other guys started to suspect he was gay, that’s what it means. I humiliated him. Then I never spoke to him again—until now.” Cary raked his fingernails across his scalp in frustration. He always felt like he was talking about someone other than himself when he thought about that summer. He didn’t
feel
like the kind of guy who would do something like that. But the bitter truth was that he had done it knowingly. Because he was too much of a chickenshit to risk anyone finding out the truth. He hadn’t been brave and self-possessed like Alex.

He swallowed hard so he could keep going, because now that he’d started, he couldn’t stop until it was all out. “He left early because of me.”

“Didn’t you come out of the closet that summer after camp?”

Marcus was surprisingly good at putting the pieces together. “Yeah.” Cary sighed. He and Marcus had never talked about anything related to Cary’s coming out, or being gay at all. Because Marcus had just fallen in line with the acceptance, it had never come up. “I felt like such a complete asshole the rest of the summer there…without him. I was scared shitless to tell everyone, but after having hidden all summer, when I came home, suddenly, I just…”

“Couldn’t hide it anymore.”

Cary nodded, embarrassed that he sounded like he was still fifteen. Normally, he never let this kind of emotional melodrama get to him. “If I’d had any balls at all, I would have owned what happened. I would have come out at camp that summer. But instead I just waited until I got home, and I never went back to camp.”

“You were a kid. You made a mistake.” When Cary didn’t respond—he didn’t know how to respond to such sympathy from his cousin—Marcus clapped him on the back. “Have you seen Alexander Evangelista lately? He’s the poster boy for rich and successful. He’s in the financial pages with his business triumphs and in the society pages because he’s dating a supermodel or some shit. If it makes you feel any better, he probably doesn’t even remember what happened.”

“Oh, he remembers.”

“So apologize, if it’s really eating at you that much.”

“I can’t.” Cary downed the rest of his drink in one gulp. “He’s also competing for Don Liu.”

Marcus whistled. “Ah, I see. The plot thickens.”

“Yeah,” Cary said.

“But still. Just talk to him. Clear the air on the personal stuff.”

“I can’t. He, uh, declared war on me.”

Marcus looked confused. “And what did you say?”

Cary let his head fall forward and hit the bar with a soft
thud.
“I declared war on him right back.”

Chapter Seven

Camp Blue Lake

Cary could tell that Alex was awake. He wasn’t making any noise. If anything, it was the lack of noise from the bunk below that gave him away. Alex was normally a restless sleeper, sighing and turning over frequently. Cary lay there as the minutes passed agonizingly slowly. Every now and then, he hit the button to light up the travel alarm clock he had in bed with him to check the barely moving time.

Finally, some movement from below, and a glance at the clock confirmed that it was nearly two. He sat up in bed, drawing Alex’s attention. He shook his head and laid a finger against his lips, though it was probably too dark for his bunkmate to see either gesture. He stayed sitting up in his bed until Alex had left the cabin, reasoning that if Alex’s departure, though it had been utterly silent, had awakened anyone, he’d give them a minute to fall back asleep before he followed. The bunk belonging to Brad, the counselor who slept in their cabin, was empty, but they still had to be careful.

Alex was waiting for him at the fork in the trail system where one branch split off toward the lake. As soon as Alex spied him, he took off down one of the trail’s branches, and Cary had to jog to catch up. He should just walk behind Alex like a normal person instead of doing his usual thing where he crowded his friend. The dark would make it extra hard to walk side by side. But as he approached, Alex moved aside automatically, making room for him. As if it was their thing. It was a good thing it was dark because Cary’s cheeks heated with pleasure. They didn’t speak, just walked, the crunching of the gravel the only sound and the beam of Alex’s flashlight the only thing Cary could see in the dark, dark night.

When they approached the point where the trail would emerge from the woods onto the beach, Alex turned off his flashlight and held out an arm to stop Cary’s progress. Cary jumped at the sensation of a mouth so close to his ear. “I heard Jasper talking to some of the counselors about the meteor shower. I think they’re watching it from the roof of the dining hall, but we need to make sure there’s no one here.” The dining hall had a flat roof that functioned as the de facto counselors’ lounge, and Cary doubted that anyone else had made the three-quarter-mile trek to the lake, but he craned his eyes, trying in vain to see into the blackness ahead of them.

“I think it’s clear,” Alex whispered.

“Come on,” Cary said, pressing ahead of Alex, propelled by the exhilaration of having escaped the physical confines of their cabin, and with it, the other guys and the increasingly oppressive norms of camp society. Transgression. That was the word that came to Cary’s mind. He shivered and, having reached the edge of the water, looked up. “Holy shit, there’s one.”

Every twenty seconds or so, a meteor streaked across the inky sky. He’d never seen anything like it.

Alex, head tilted back, said, “I wish there were a way to get to an open field or something, to see the whole sky.”

It was true. They were on the shore, and the tree line obscured a fair portion of the sky. An idea hit him. Why the hell not? He was feeling brave. “Maybe there is.” He stripped off his shirt and started walking toward the water.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s a warm night.” Before he could lose his nerve, he waded into the shallows, then kept going until he was submerged up to his waist. He didn’t look back to see if Alex was following, just started swimming toward the floating dock thirty feet out in the lake. He breathed a sigh of relief when he heard the gentle sluicing of the water behind him signaling that Alex had gotten into the water, too. Knowing that he wasn’t making himself completely ridiculous emboldened him, and he slowed down so Alex could catch up.

“This is kind of ridiculous,” Alex said, using the very word Cary had just been thinking as he breast stroked up and then started treading water next to Cary, who couldn’t help barking a delighted laugh. It felt like Alex could see inside his head, like maybe this weird, magical night had changed the laws of physics so that everything was inside out. Maybe when he’d taken his shirt off, he’d bared not his body, or not
only
his body, but made something else visible, too, something deeper.

“Hey,” Cary said, propelling himself through the water again, “your wish is my command. The view is going to be great from here.” When they reached the dock, he found the algae-slimed ladder with his feet and hoisted himself up, shivering as the air, which was cooler than the water, hit his skin. He moved aside to leave room for Alex to come up and lay down on his back. “Whoa. You’re going to thank me when you see this.”

From Cary’s vantage point, Alex looked like a sea god as he hoisted himself up on the ladder and stood above Cary, water raining down from a wet body painted silver by the light of the half moon. He paused for a moment, then came to lie next to Cary, leaving only inches between them. It was hard for Cary to make himself look away. But there was a sky full of shooting stars above them. They watched the celestial show for a few moments.

“You’re supposed to wish on falling stars,” Alex said, his voice raspy as it punctured the silence. “But it seems kind of pointless in this context, doesn’t it?” He gestured upward.

“Pointless how?” Cary asked.

“Well, I think the idea is that a falling star is such a rare thing that when you do see one, you get to make a wish on it. Like a four-leaf clover. You don’t come across shooting stars or four-leaf clovers every day.”

Cary didn’t like the idea of wishes not counting on a night like this, when the sky seemed like it was literally erupting with possibility. “I don’t know. You could also look at it like this: Shooting stars are rare. So it’s even rarer to see hundreds of them in the same night. Maybe that just, like, magnifies the power of your wish.” God. He was an idiot. He turned his head to look at Alex, whom he could just make out in the blackness. “That sounded less lame in my head,” he said, hoping to save himself with self-deprecation.

Alex turned his head, too. “Not lame.” After a momentary pause, he rolled all the way onto his side. “What would you wish for?”

Their faces were inches apart, and Cary was seized with the wild idea that instead of answering, he could
show
Alex what he wished for. It would be so easy.

Cary had kissed girls before. Two of them, to be precise. Because that was what you did when you, for example, asked a girl to the ninth-grade formal. You picked her up and gave her a corsage. You listened to her parents issue warnings about curfews that were laced with unspoken warnings that were unnecessary in your case—their daughter was safer with you than anyone knew. Then you brought her home and kissed her on her porch.

And then when she started getting ideas the next week in school, that you were her boyfriend, you broke up with her.

It was easy. Like being in a play. You performed your role, and when the run was over, you put away your costume and went back to being your real self. Or if not your real self, you went back to playing a more familiar role.

This was not like that. If he kissed Alex, he had no idea what the morning would bring. It wasn’t like he could avoid him—they were bunk-mates, for God’s sake. Never mind that they were surrounded by semi-hostile guys who didn’t need to know Cary’s business and certainly didn’t need any more ammo when it came to Alex.

Cary’s lungs had stopped working. He couldn’t get a full breath in. But somehow, he knew that the only way to ease the pressure on his chest was, paradoxically, to just do it, all the reasons he shouldn’t be damned. “I would wish for this,” he whispered, and then he did it.

And as cliché at it was, suddenly those stars in the sky were nothing. The universe could throw its most spectacular show at them, and it was
nothing
. Because he was kissing Alex Evangelista, and Alex Evangelista was kissing him back.