After Ben (2 page)

Theo hesitated for a moment. Watching the ripple of disappointment on the other man’s face, quickly masked with a smile, snapped Theo back into the present.

“Okay. Just give me a few.”

The other man nodded and walked over to the weights, selecting a bar and a set of weight clamps as Theo slowed and stretched. When Theo approached, he turned to face him, hand outstretched.

“I’m Peter. I’ve seen you here often, but never using the weights.”

Theo wiped his own hand on his T-shirt, then shook Peter’s, appreciating his firm, quick grip and release. He’d been slightly concerned that Peter’s request might be a pick-up attempt. It had happened before. The whole point of these early morning runs was to tire his body physically. He’d woken up hard again, and instead of taking matters into his own hands, he ran. It wasn’t that he was averse to jerking off, but he had come to understand that doing so to get to sleep, then dreaming of Ben all night was so much better than doing the same thing in the morning and facing the whole day alone. Something about starting the day with a lonely orgasm just set his mood too low.

Theo smiled for a second as he considered explaining his jerk-off policy to this stranger, then realized that this was reality, not his Internet message board, where normal social rules didn’t seem to apply.

“I’m Theo.” He watched Peter pull on some gloves. “I usually just run. I guess I kind of waste my membership.”

“Hey, it’s cool. But if you ever want to work on different muscle groups, just ask.” Peter turned toward the mirrors and flexed a little. He looked good—very good, to be honest. Theo cast his eyes between their reflections and wondered what Peter thought of his own physique. Theo was taller by at least two or three inches—he was six foot two in his stocking feet—and his body was lean under a wide pair of shoulders. Peter looked stockier, but he carried it well, all around his shoulders and chest.

Very nice.

He spotted Peter while he worked through his routine, then accepted his good-natured offer of help and lifted for a while as Peter slipped weights on and off his bar, figuring out his optimal weight. Peter apologized when sweat from his forehead dripped onto Theo, then reached out to swipe it away.

It was the work of a moment. A quick touch, that was all, but Theo lost count of his reps.

Time to get to work. He smiled, excusing himself due to an early meeting, ignoring Peter’s sudden look of worry—he really had very blue eyes—then showered quickly and changed into his suit. As he drove to the office, he had to keep unclenching his hands from the steering wheel. Theo told himself it was okay. It really was. It was only 8 a.m., and already he’d spoken to another human being—someone that he didn’t even line-manage.

This was progress.

He backed into his office, dumping the file box on the floor by his desk, then slumped for a moment into his comfortable leather chair. When his personal assistant, Maggie, came in a few minutes later with his coffee, he was in the same position. Smiling at her greeting, noting her slightly raised brow at his clear desk and blank computer screen, Theo quickly reassured her.

“I’m fine. I was just thinking about the board meeting.” Taking in Maggie’s skeptical look, and the way she pursed her lips, he continued, “I’m fine. Really. I just did a little extra at the gym, that’s all.”

“Mmm-hmm.” Maggie perched on his side of the desk, her hazel eyes fixed on his.

Sighing, Theo shut his eyes and told his PA—the tiny red-haired woman who had fended off all the well-meaning visitors, then turned down all the invitations to dinners and dances and whatnot he’d received marked “plus one” over the last year—all about his morning.

“I talked to a man at the gym. He was friendly. We worked out. He touched me. I left.”

“And?”

Her small, freckled hand reached out and smoothed his tie, wrestled the knot back to perfect center, then reached a little farther and held his hand.

“I panicked. He was about my age, I guess, very fit, well spoken, and pleasant. He was probably straight.” Theo drew in a breath, then huffed it back out. “I think I liked him.” When he looked up, Maggie was only slightly blurry, so he blinked a few times.

There. Progress.

Maggie smiled but maintained her silence, which was just one of the reasons Theo employed her. She was the keeper of his secrets, listener to his long stretches of silence. The poor woman had had a baptism of fire, starting work just a month or so before he lost Ben. She squeezed his hand before listing his meetings for the rest of the day.

Business as usual.

M
UCH
later that afternoon, Theo slumped back in his seat as Maggie watched from the office doorway. At his tight-lipped, white-faced nod, she pulled the door closed behind her and sat opposite him, waiting for Theo to share the outcome of the board meeting. When he finally spoke, his usually calm, measured voice was a dull monotone.

“A third, Maggie.” He shook his head as she gasped, hand quickly pressed over her mouth. “A third of all positions have to be eliminated from each department within the next four weeks.”

Theo turned his chair, then stood and walked over to the window, watching as employees—colleagues, friends—left to start the commute home to their partners and families. Most had mortgage payments or rent due, and probably had credit card bills to pay too; some still had student loans to service. All were completely unsuspecting.

“But why?”

Theo shook his head. He was so fucking disgusted that he could barely begin to explain to Maggie how poor management decisions much further up the chain of command had led to a wholesale loss of business. There was little point in dwelling on the politics, whether global or corporate. Maggie understood well enough that the economy was in bad shape.

Theo’s department dealt with accounts, a core service offered by their company. To cut his staff was shortsighted in the extreme. He’d had to fire people before, but that was back in the early days. These people were like family now. Theo wondered if he should have seen this coming, but guessed that he’d been a little distracted for the past year.

“How will we manage over audit season?” Maggie raised a valid question, one that had whipped around Theo’s head since that afternoon’s meeting. His snort of laughter wasn’t a happy sound, and he bit his lip and tried to rein in his anxiety about managing the human cost of this completely shitty situation.

“Interns. Lots more interns. That’s the suggestion from the top. Recruit double the interns over the busy periods, then reallocate work to the lower-grade staff.” Theo thought it was madness, short-term thinking at its fucking worst. There were sure to be errors. He felt frustration wash over him, certain that clients would be billed the same, even if the bulk of the work was done by unqualified student interns. It was unprofessional, unethical even, and would result in losing more business if it became common knowledge.

Theo knew he was between a rock and a hard place. He could complain, or resist the cost cutting that would almost certainly lead to more job losses. For the first time since his own idealistic student days, he considered the human cost of business.

Fuck, he sounded like that newbie on the forum.

Running a hand through his thick hair, tugging it a little, he shook his head to clear it. This wasn’t a time for childlike wishing that life would be fair. Life wasn’t fair; it never had been. He, of all people, understood that all too well.

They left the office late, both glad to be the last to vacate their floor, certain that their faces would have given them away if the cubicles they passed had been occupied. Theo drove Maggie home and sat outside her neat white-painted house discussing the best way to move forward.

“There isn’t a best way, Theo. There just isn’t.” Sighing, Maggie clutched her purse and unfastened her seatbelt before turning back to him. “Please don’t forget to eat, and try to get some sleep. The rest of this week isn’t going to be easy.” She squeezed his fingers, then stepped out of the car, scooping up her youngest daughter as she toddled down the driveway toward her. Maggie’s husband watched from the front door, looking concerned as he studied his wife’s face. He held the door wide open for her, then nodded a farewell to Theo.

Waving good-bye, Theo headed home. How he came to park in the small lot behind the gym he had absolutely no idea. Maybe his subconscious was telling him to tire himself out with a longer run than he had managed that morning. Maybe he was hoping to get distracted from the unavoidable decisions he had to make by a pair of bright blue eyes, and a smile that was warm and welcoming. Perhaps having someone to talk to, someone to share his load with who didn’t work in his field, was what he needed right then.

Sitting in the lot for a moment longer, he recalled Maggie’s well-meaning words, “Don’t forget to eat.”

Theo rested his head on the steering wheel.

How many times had Ben said the same words in Italian when Theo had been knee-deep in learning the corporate ropes, right out of grad school? He’d squint at Theo when he staggered home late, needing help to get in the front door, then feed him his dinner—bite by delicious bite—as he grumbled over tax laws.

Theo drove home alone.

Later, after making the first difficult sweep through the staff files, picking out the most likely to lose their positions, he sat in bed, completely exhausted, with a bowl of cereal he absolutely did not want to eat. Logging on to the forum for five minutes’ distraction from real life, he stumbled into what read like a civil war.

The newbie had been busy.

It had taken Morgan only twenty-four hours to split the membership. Maybe he’d been staging reconnaissance for a while, unnoticed. For all Theo knew, Morgan could have been trolling the day before, looking for logical fallacies and other weaknesses in the members’ arguments. There was no fucking way he could have divided the membership so quickly and neatly without being keenly intellectual. Theo laughed to himself, then looked around the bedroom guiltily, feeling ridiculous. After sitting up straighter and pulling the laptop closer, he shoveled down his slightly soggy Cheerios while clicking links.

Oh, yes. Morgan was very clever.

He’d taken apart the main forum players’ arguments by tracking back their own comments. Theo guessed that everyone contradicted themselves from time to time, but it was casually amusing to see other people’s dirty washing hanging out in public. Besides, the points Morgan had made the prior evening hadn’t been wrong, just naïve, perhaps.

The way he’d taken the discussions apart today was the work of an evil genius.

Theo couldn’t resist. After a completely shitty day, he felt like sticking one to The Man. Joining a discussion on free trade, he supported Morgan’s argument, something he would never have done without the dose of corporate reality he’d had that afternoon, and then sat back, waiting for his virtual spanking. He moved from topic to topic—from the economy to the new tax code to a local politician caught with his pants down—playing the devil’s advocate.

Theo sat in his bed, pink cheeked, wide awake, and smiling.

As the evening passed, his in-box was flooded with messages asking if he’d suffered a stroke or if his account had been hacked. Snorting to himself, he let loose on a thread about shareholder responsibility, then went to the kitchen and fought with the coffeemaker that he’d never managed to master, preferring to leave domestic shit to Ben. Sliding back into bed with some microwave popcorn and strong coffee, Theo settled down for some more fun.

When he saw a private message from the newbie, he grinned.

MORGAN: Thanks for playing.

They chatted back and forth for the next few hours via the forum’s messaging service, never sharing more than a sentence or two, but always poking fun at each other’s posts. The more Theo read, the more impressed he was.

What he’d taken for Morgan’s idealism just the day before, he now saw through a more focused lens. The responsibility for firing colleagues weighed so heavily on Theo’s shoulders that when he considered the senior partners’ bonuses and the company jet, it all seemed morally bankrupt. It felt good to see Morgan running amok on the forum with opinions that challenged the status quo. And it felt even better to run with him for a few hours, virtually flipping the bird.

When he finally signed off, promising his few forum friends that normal service would resume the next evening, he saw another private message pop up.

MORGAN: Missing you already.

Shutting the laptop down quickly, Theo stared at the ceiling, fingers heading for Ben’s pillow. Sighing, turning stubbornly away, he whispered, “
Mi manchi già
,” just like Ben had when Theo left each morning. I miss you already.

Sleep took a while to come. Then, when he woke before his alarm, face buried in Ben’s pillow, the day ahead seemed far too much like hard work.

E
ARBUDS
were no defense against Peter.

Theo ran, attempting to keep focused, trying not to let anything or anyone distract him. Peter ran beside Theo, keeping pace easily, upping his speed or incline when Theo did, slowing to the same gentle jog for the last half mile, smiling the whole time. He pointed at his own ears, indicating that Theo should remove his earbuds as he wiped down his treadmill, then resumed their conversation from the previous day.

Peter herded Theo over to the mirrored weights area and selected some of the smaller free weights.

“So many people don’t realize that working on their back and shoulders will improve their running performance.” He demonstrated a technique, then passed the weights to Theo. “No, keep your elbows tucked in. Yes, like that. Better.” He walked around Theo, tapping at his shoulders when they rose too high, nudging his elbow when he overcompensated for the weight instead of letting his muscles take the strain.

When he rested both palms lightly on Theo’s shoulders toward the end of a set of harder reps, Theo’s face in the mirror reflected his discomfort—panic?—at the physical contact. Instead of moving away, Peter stepped closer. Theo watched in the mirror as Peter’s lips thinned, pressed together tightly for a moment, leaving his face suddenly looking more mature. They were definitely close in age. Only Peter’s smiles made him seem more youthful.