His Heart's Revenge (49th Floor Novels) (8 page)

Chapter Ten

Camp Blue Lake

Alex had waited as long as he could for Cary to come back from his run before setting out for the dining hall. He could only dawdle outside their cabin for so long before he had to stop being so pathetic and hit the road for his shift. Scrambled eggs for two-hundred hungry boys and assorted counselors wasn’t going to make itself.

And, more to the point, if Cary didn’t want to talk to him, there was nothing Alex could do about it.

Everything in him resisted that conclusion, though. Two nights ago on the lake, everything had been so…perfect. He struggled to understand how two people could be so intimate and then, the next day…nothing. When they had finally pulled away from one another, from their heated kissing, it had been as if by mutual, silent assent. Alex knew they couldn’t just have sex on the floating raft on Blue Lake, as much as part of him might have wanted to. He was the nerd, the scholar. He’d paid attention in sex ed. They didn’t have condoms, and besides, he knew he wasn’t ready. So although he’d rolled onto his back with a killer boner tenting his shorts, he’d never been happier. Except maybe a second later when Cary had followed him, not to continue to the kiss, merely to roll onto his side and rest his head on Alex’s chest. Alex hadn’t known such flat-out exhilaration was possible in this world. It was dark enough that Cary couldn’t see him grinning up at the lightshow above them, couldn’t see how his arms shook as they snaked around Cary as he snuggled even closer to Alex.

But Cary, with his head directly on Alex’s bare chest, could, no doubt, feel the out-of-control pounding of Alex’s heart.

But he didn’t care. He wanted Cary to know that his foolish heart beat for him.

Still. It wasn’t like he was so naive he thought they would spend the rest of camp holding hands and making googly eyes at each other.

But he had sort of thought, as they walked through the woods back to the cabins, that things had definitively changed between them. That if Cary’s heart contained even a fraction of the happiness and relief and lust and
everything
that Alex’s did, the rest of the summer would make all the bullshit of Alex’s years at camp more than worth it.

When Cary hadn’t gone running that next morning, Alex had been disappointed, but he’d chalked it up to exhaustion. They’d gotten back to the cabin at three a.m., and Cary usually rose at five for his runs. Alex didn’t have any choice—he had to drag his tired ass into work—but Cary could probably skip a run without it having a big impact on his training. He hadn’t seen Cary the rest of the day, but he tried not to obsess about it. They often went a whole day without seeing each other, especially on days when their programming class didn’t meet.

But today. The second morning. Cary had gotten up at his usual time. Alex had heard him. Had lifted his head, tuning his ears to the sound of Cary dressing in the dark, straining to make it out against the deep breathing and light snoring of the other guys. What had he been waiting for? Surely nothing so overt as a hand on his shoulder. But some kind of acknowledgment. A look, maybe. Something that said, “We have a connection.”

But Cary hadn’t looked. Hadn’t given any sign that he sensed Alex’s presence at all.

And now he wasn’t here.

He shoved aside the unease. He knew shit all about relationships, but he was pretty sure that being clingy and insecure was not the way to a guy’s heart. He could be cool. Except something in his heart resisted.
No. I can’t be cool.
That was the whole fucking problem. He never could be, and this thing with Cary was not likely to be the event that started him down the path to cool.

He was forced to set aside his angst-ing, though, when he got to the dining hall. He was fifteen minutes late, and Jasper was in a tizzy. The other morning workers shot him dirty looks as he put on an apron. He didn’t blame them. Jasper’s kitchen was a well-oiled machine. Lots of things depended on other things, and everyone had a job. If you weren’t there to do yours, it had a domino effect. So he grabbed a bowl and set himself to cracking eggs. The repetition was almost meditative. He must have cracked twenty-dozen eggs, passing bowls of a dozen of them at a time on down the line, when Jasper interrupted. Feeling calmer than he had all morning, he set about following Jasper’s order to shuttle vats of jelly and butter out to the self-service toasters that sat on a station in the middle of the dining room.

A bunch of guys were lined up there—there was always more demand for toast than toasters to meet it. Alex was shielded by the line at one toaster when he heard some guys milling around the other one talking.

“Up early canoodling with Kitchen Boy this morning, Bell?” Alex recognized the voice as that preppy jerk Brooks

“Uh, nope, just a long run as usual,” Cary said. “Canoodling’s not really my thing.”

Alex’s mind flashed back to the way Cary had rolled over and curled into his chest on the dock.

“So when the two of you left in the middle of the night two nights ago, you’re saying there was no canoodling involved?” said another voice.

“Yeah,” Brooks sneered. “I’m pretty sure that in addition to being a huge nerd and a sad-ass charity case, Cinderella Boy is a big fucking fag. You’d better be careful, Bell, or it will wear off on you, if it hasn’t already.”

Alex couldn’t hear what Cary was saying. All he could hear was his own heartbeat like thunder. He tried to slow his breathing. Cary had never thrown him under the bus before. To the contrary, Cary was usually the one telling Brooks and his henchmen to knock it off when they got all up in Alex’s face. Because whatever else was or was not going on between them, Cary was a good guy.

But no one had ever called him a fag before. They picked on him for lots of things, but so far, he’d thought he’d been successful in hiding his sexuality.

“Can you imagine?” said another sneering voice. “What if all this time we’ve been sharing a cabin with a couple of fags?”

Then one of the Neanderthals started up with the chant, “Cary and Kitchen Boy sitting in a tree…”

“Which one of you takes it in the ass?” Brooks said through laughter. “My money’s on Kitchen Boy, but hell, maybe you’ll surprise us, Bell.”

Enough. Alex’s face burned, but his stock couldn’t possibly fall any lower at this camp and he wasn’t about to stand by and let those jerks turn on Cary. Alex knew what it was like to be an outcast. Whatever else happened, he didn’t want that for Cary.

So he pushed through the line of guys acting as a de facto border between him and Brooks and his crew. “Shut up, assholes.”

The assholes in question turned as one. Cary turned. As soon as he met Alex’s eyes—the first time they’d looked directly at each other since two nights ago—Alex knew he had made a mistake.

But there was no taking it back. There he was, holding a vat of butter and a vat of strawberry jelly, his future at this godforsaken camp—no, his future in
life
—hanging in the balance.

“What about it?” Brooks taunted Cary. “Maybe you can use some of that butter to grease up Kitchen Boy’s dick before he fucks your ass?”

Tears prickled behind Alex’s eyelids, but damned if he would let them see him cry. He was no prude, but hearing Brooks speak so crudely shocked him. The worst thing was that Brooks and his henchmen had taken something beautiful, a night of a thousand falling stars where anything was possible, and made it seem tawdry, crude.

No, the worst thing was what happened next.

Cary looked at him and said, “I think maybe you have me confused with someone else, Brooks. Kitchen Boy and I hardly know each other.”

Alex should have known it was the wrong thing to do, but he took a step toward Cary, extending a hand as if to remind him, “Yes, we do know each other.” As if a failure of memory was the only thing that had prompted those cruel words.

Cary reared back in an exaggerated fashion and raised his hands as if protecting himself. “Dude, I know you have a big gay crush on me, but back the fuck off.” When the other boys started laughing, Cary joined them.

Alex blinked. He was afraid for a moment that he wouldn’t be able to stop the tears. But then they just…went away. Dried up. Everything in him dried up, in fact. All the suppleness, all the resilience that had gotten him this far being the poor, nerdy, queer kid just hardened up like clay in a kiln. In the space of a breath, he became brittle.

But it was better than crying. He could work with brittle. Brittle could get things done. Brittle could propel his legs forward in space. He could see now, with stunning clarity, that brittle was a way to be in the world. Maybe brittle had been what was missing.

So he did the only thing he could do, which was to calmly set down the butter and jelly, take off his apron, and walk out of the dining hall. He didn’t look at Cary, and he didn’t look back.

Chapter Eleven

Alexander hadn’t realized how much David used to text him until he stopped. His personal phone, which was lying on his desk as he worked late into the evening, had been utterly silent for four days.

He thought of calling David. Part of him wanted to call.

Well, that wasn’t it so much as part of him wanted to get laid. He’d always tried to walk the fine line between “random hook ups” and “boyfriends” territory with the men in his life. He had no philosophical objection to Grindr, but he liked to be comfortable and in control of a situation. He didn’t want strangers in his condo, but he also didn’t have time to run all over town playing games.

But he also most decidedly didn’t want a boyfriend. His friend Barbara, a Dominion board member who’d elbowed her way into his personal life, was always trying to psychoanalyze him on the topic, sure that there had been some traumatic event in his past that had hardened his heart. One day, he’d stop deflecting and tell her the truth: there had been. But although such a confession might get Barbara off his back, it would also open a whole new line of questioning. Barbara was like a dog with a bone when she wanted something. The tough-as-nails society-wife-turned-lawyer never took no for an answer, which was what made her an excellent board member. She would fall into hysterics over the prospect that he was closing himself off to the possibility of love, resigning himself to a lifetime alone.

What he would never be able to make her understand was that he wanted it that way. Yes there had been a traumatic inciting event—that day in the dining hall at camp. Yes, it had been awful in the moment. But he was actually glad it had happened. It had made him who he was, and he
liked
who he was. He had conquered the world because of the brittleness he’d embraced that day. That he was incapable of giving his heart to a man was a side effect, but not one that bothered him in the least.

But damn, he was horny. And he blamed Cary Bell. That searing kiss in the hallway the other night had kept him up the rest of the fucking night, and he was still thinking about it.

Still, he couldn’t call David. Even if Alexander was incapable of romantic feelings, of crushes, he understood, intellectually, that these things existed in the world for most people. And he
liked
David. David deserved to get what he wanted, not to be led on.

Sighing, he grabbed his phone and opened Grindr. Ruthless, he tapped on and then rejected half a dozen profiles that had initially looked promising. Maybe he was a snob, but he had standards. He wanted a professional. He wanted someone athletic. He wanted someone with blue-gray eyes.

What the fuck?

Where had that come from? Who the hell cared about eye color?

Disgusted with himself, he dropped the phone on his desk.

Then it rang, startling the hell out of him.

He harbored a momentary, irrational thought that it was Cary, but that was impossible. Very few people had his personal number, and Cary was most decidedly not one of them.

He clamored to pick up the phone and see the display. Johan.

Right. He closed his eyes for a moment and thought back to that moment at camp. That moment
before
he’d become brittle, when he could still feel everything. When things like love and betrayal still had meaning.

He answered the call. “Johan?”

“Mr. Evangelista, good evening. I’ve got something on your man.”

He’s not
my
man
, Alexander wanted to protest.

“It’s probably not what you were thinking of,” Johan went on. “It’s more of an HR issue. That’s why it took me so long to get back to you. I dug deep, and I honestly couldn’t find any evidence of financial impropriety. Nowhere. Rosemann Investments is squeaky clean in that sense.”

Because Cary Bell is a good guy
, a part of him said. He quashed that part.

“I don’t know what your…aim is,” Johan said. “But I thought this might be useful.”

Alexander’s aim was to bring Cary Bell to his knees and win the Liu account. So he steeled himself. Sure, he’d fantasized about insider trading or something similarly juicy, but he would take what he could get. “Let’s have it.”

“Sexual harassment.”

“Excuse me?”

“Settled out of court, but only on the eve of a trial, with a gag rule. But there was a case brought against him by an employee—a male employee. My sources are saying the plaintiff alleged that Bell propositioned him and wouldn’t take no for an answer, and that those propositions escalated until the plaintiff was forced to take a stress leave.”

It wasn’t true. Cary wasn’t the type. But it didn’t really matter if it was true, did it? “Any idea who the accuser was?”

“Nope. The judge granted him the anonymity routinely given to victims of sexual assault.”

“And that was it on Bell? Nothing else?”

“Nada.”

Alexander walked over to his window, which looked south, out across the very southern part of downtown and further over Lake Ontario. “This would be a matter of public record, then, would it not? The case, if not the identity of the accuser?”

“Yep. It doesn’t seem that your man has a high enough profile that the media got interested—it was just your garden variety sexual harassment case. But sure, it would be in the court’s records.”

“Could you get a copy of whatever is publicly available?”

“Sure thing.”

Alexander hesitated. And in the space of his indecision a phrase floated into his brain.

Kitchen Boy and I hardly know each other.

Alexander cleared his throat. “And could you see that whatever you find gets sent—on the down low—to the office of a man named Don Liu?”

There was a beat of silence on the line. Alexander knew Johan’s MO was that he dug up the info his clients wanted, and that was it. What they did with it was up to them. Even though he spent much of his time mucking about in the underworld, he had a code of sorts. He would find the info, but he wouldn’t act on it. But the bank had given Johan a shit ton of business in the last few years. So Alexander let the silence extend a little longer.

“I could,” said Johan, and Alexander breathed a sigh of relief.

“Liu has recently moved—”

“I know where to find Liu,” Johan interrupted.

Of course he did. Johan knew everyone. Normally, Alexander hated being interrupted, but he allowed it because he knew he’d asked Johan for something way out of his comfort zone, and clearly the guy wanted off the phone.

“Thanks, Johan. Send your invoice to my home address.”

After he disconnected the call, Alexander was confronted by the still-open but useless Grindr app on his phone.

“Fuck!” he whispered into his empty office.

Then he laughed, bitterly. Because he
couldn’t
fuck. That was his problem. Cary Bell had somehow seen to that, hadn’t he?

So he said it again, louder this time, because why not? He sure as hell wasn’t
doing
it.

“Fuck.”