The Centaur’s Impulse (Bathhouse Beasts #15)

1

Seventh hole. I sliced it deep into the trees.

I’d barely slept. That was the real answer. The other excuses, the wind, my grip, and the new driver, were the ones I’d been saying out loud all morning because they were easier and didn’t require an explanation.

“AJ.” Kavi’s voice behind me, careful. “Come on, man.”

“I saw it.”

“You want a mulligan?”

“No.”

“You should take a mulligan.”

“I said no, Kavi.”

I swung the driver in a tight arc at my side. My shoulders were locked up. My back was locked up. My grip felt off in a way I couldn’t diagnose. Four hours of sleep the night before, three the night before that, and it was showing up in everything now. Not just my swing. Everything.

I dropped another ball on the tee.

This one didn’t slice. This one hooked. Hard. Into the rough on the other side of the fairway.

“Great,” I said. “Cool.”

Kavi didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he sat his driver down, walked over, and put a hand on my shoulder.

“Let’s just walk to the ball,” he said. “Take a beat. Talk on the way.”

I let him steer me toward the cart path.

Kavi Rajan had been my mentor before he was my board member, and before he was my friend.

By this point in my life, he was pretty much my best friend.

My only friend. He’d helped lead our company out of the economic turmoil that was the late two-thousands when the market collapsed.

And he was there again when lockdowns forced us to restructure our entire way of doing business.

He was there through the backlash, the tarrifs, and the bullshit that seemed to plague us at every corner.

He was fifty-four now. Silver at the temples.

He moved like a man who’d been through hell and found his way out with a smile on his face.

I still didn’t understand how he did it. He’d never told me his story. I’d never asked. But he’d found something. I could tell.

The afternoon light was doing that low gold October thing that makes everything look like it belongs in a magazine.

The fairway was too green, the trees were going red at the edges of their leaves, and the sky was a clean cold blue.

It was a beautiful day. Hell, I’d even chosen to be here instead of working.

And I wasn’t enjoying any of it.

Anything and everything else seemed to occupy my thoughts besides enjoying my well-deserved break.

The board deck from Wednesday was in my head.

I wondered whether Nadia had signed off on the revised metrics or not.

The term sheet from the strategies team that had come in Thursday night, and I still hadn’t had a chance to look at it.

There were at least seventeen new unread emails piled up in my inbox in the past hour I’d been on the course.

Not because anything from my company was urgent on a Saturday morning.

But because I’d built the company that way, and the people who worked for me had learned to match my drive.

But now, at the age of thirty-nine, I was running out of steam.

“AJ,” Kavi said. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“When’s the last time you took a vacation?”

“I took a vacation in June,” I said automatically.

“You took a long weekend in June. You worked through most of it. Chidi told me.”

I scoffed. “Chidi is a snitch.”

“Chidi is your COO. He is legally required to be a snitch about the fact that you don’t sleep.” Kavi glanced at me. “When’s the last time you took a real one? A week or more?”

I had to think about it. That surprised me a little. I had to go back a lot further than I expected.

“Bali,” I said. “Right after we closed on that new location.”

“AJ. That was four and a half years ago.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

We walked. Our shoes crunched on the path. Somewhere over the fairway another group was laughing about something. They were boisterous and loud, clearly having the time of their lives. I hadn’t laughed like that in years.

“I want to say something to you,” Kavi said.

“Uh-oh.”

“Just hear me out,” he replied, cutting me off before I could make a sarcastic remark. “I’ve been thinking about how to say it for probably a year at this point.”

I stopped walking. He stopped a few steps ahead and turned around, hands in his pockets, doing that thing his face did when he was going to say something that would cost him.

“You are killing yourself,” he said. “And I’ve decided I’m not going to sit and watch you do it anymore.”

I opened my mouth.

He held up a hand.

“I’m not saying this as your board member. Not as an investor. I’m not filing a report with the comp committee. I’m saying it as a guy who’s known you for years and loves you like a brother. You are killing yourself. Slowly. Carefully. You’ve been doing it for at least two years.

I’ve watched you do it and I haven’t said anything because I figured it wasn’t my place. Today I decided it was. Because if I don’t say it, who will?”

I stood there with my driver in my hand feeling like I’d been punched in the gut.

He was right about the last part. Nobody else was going to say it.

Not Chidi. Chidi worked for me. Not Nadia, that’s for sure.

She was my head of product, my fae ex, and the person I’d spent eight months carefully not saying anything real to.

My mother would have spoken out, but she was in a dementia-care facility outside of town now and hadn’t recognized me the last three times I’d visited.

My brother in Atlanta and I saw each other twice a year on holidays and had never, in thirty-nine years, talked about anything that mattered.

My old teammates might’ve said something too.

But I hadn’t gone to the hockey arena in years.

I didn’t even know if they were there anymore.

Kavi was the only person I had left.

“I hear you,” I said.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t do the corporate I-hear-you bullshit. Don’t handle me like I’m an HR liability. I’ve been in hundreds of meetings with you, AJ. I know how you work.”

I laughed. It came out short and dry. “Okay.”

“I’m not joking, AJ,” he said, not breaking eye contact. “This is serious.”

I looked at him. The sun was low and lit up half his face, and for a second I didn’t recognize him.

This wasn’t my serious colleague that got things done, or even the guy who let loose at company Christmas parties.

The Kavi standing in front of me right now had worry in his eyes and all of it was directed at me.

“Fine,” I said. “I’m listening.”

He nodded. Then he turned and started walking again, and I fell in beside him, and he told me the rest of it.

“I need you to take a vacation,” he said simply. “A real one. Get the hell out of here for at least a week, if not more.”

“Maybe in a couple months I could find the time?—”

“No,” Kavi said, cutting me off. “Now. Today. Not a couple months from now.”

“But there’s that big?—”

“I don’t care, AJ,” he barked. “We can take care of it. Everyone at the company will survive for a week or two without you. It’s not going to go under, it’s not going to catch on fire, and it’s not going to fall apart.”

He paused, giving me a good once over. “But you are going to fucking die on the job if you don’t do something. No amount of assistants, calendars, or therapy is going to replace actual rest.”

I felt my jaw tighten. “Kavi, I appreciate what you’re saying, but you don’t understand the position we’re in right now. The Q4 projections alone?—”

“I understand perfectly,” he said, his voice steady but firm. “I understand that you’ve built something incredible. And I understand that you’re going to lose it all if you keep going like this because you won’t be alive to run it.”

The words hung between us like smoke. We walked in silence for a moment, the only sound was our footsteps on the cart path and the distant crack of a club hitting a ball somewhere behind us.

“So what do you want me to do?” I asked finally. “Just disappear for a week? Tell everyone I’m out of office?”

“Yes,” Kavi said. “That’s exactly what I want you to do.”

“That’s not realistic.”

“Neither is working yourself to death at thirty-nine,” he replied. He stopped walking and turned to face me fully. “Look, I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told you before. Something I don’t talk about with anyone, actually.”

I waited. Something in his tone had shifted. This was different now.

“I used to be like you,” Kavi continued.

“Worse, probably. Fourteen-hour days, weekends in the office, checking emails at three in the morning. My wife would beg me to take a break and I’d tell her next quarter, next year, once we hit this milestone.”

He looked away toward the tree line. “One day I had a panic attack so severe I thought I was having a heart attack. They took me to the hospital. Ran every test. My heart was fine. My mind, though...”

He trailed off, shaking his head. “That was the wake-up call.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. Kavi had always seemed so put together, so balanced. I figured he’d been through stuff in his life, that he’d been through struggle. We all had. But the look in his eyes… It was more intense than I expected.

“After that,” he said, “I found this place. A bathhouse, actually, in the warehouse district.”

He turned his head toward the sky, taking a deep breath.

“It’s just... it’s quiet. There’s water, heat, and relaxation. You can stay there for hours and not think about anything in the outside world. There I can just… exist.”

He looked at me. “I go there when I need to remember how to breathe. How to be a human being instead of a machine.”

“A bathhouse,” I repeated. “Like a hot tub place or something?”

“They have those too,” he nodded. “It’s about forty minutes from here. I think you should go. Tell them I sent you. Spend a day there and just let go for once. They’ll take care of you.”

“And if I hate this place?” I said. “If it does nothing for me? What then?”

“Then I don’t know how to help you.”

I looked at him for a long moment, trying to gauge whether he was serious or if this was some kind of elaborate joke. But Kavi’s face was set in that determined expression I’d learned to recognize over the years. It was the one that meant he wasn’t going to back down.

“A bathhouse,” I said again, testing the words out like they might taste bad. “You’re telling me your solution to my burnout is a bathhouse?”

“I’m telling you it saved my life,” Kavi replied evenly. “And I think you need saving.”

There was something about the way he said it that made me want to argue, to throw up all the reasons why this was impractical, why I couldn’t just disappear, why the company needed me. But I was tired. So fucking tired. And maybe that’s why I didn’t immediately shut him down.

“What’s it called?” I asked.

“It’s just the bathhouse,” he said. “The place keeps everything very anonymous. There’s no names shared, no questions asked, and it's very private.”

We reached my ball in the rough. I looked down at it, half-buried in the thick grass, and decided I didn’t care enough to hit it. I picked it up instead and dropped it in my pocket.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“Don’t think about it,” Kavi said. “Do it. Today. Before you change your mind and convince yourself you have some crisis that can’t wait.”

I knew he was right. I also knew that the second we got back to the clubhouse, I’d check my phone and find some reason why I couldn’t go. Some email, some call, some board member who needed something from me. That’s how it always worked.

But as we walked back toward the cart in the fading October light, something in me shifted.

Maybe it was desperation. Maybe it was the fact that Kavi had actually scared me a little bit back there.

Not with his words, but with the intensity behind them.

A man like Kavi didn’t exaggerate. A man like him didn’t issue warnings unless he meant them.

“Okay,” I said quietly. “I’ll go tonight.”

“Thank you,” Kavi nodded, satisfied. “And there’s only one stipulation to all of this.”

“What’s that?”

“You can’t tell anyone about it,” he said. “Not Chidi, not Nadia, and definitely not my wife.”

I furrowed my brows, looking him over. “What’s the big secret? It’s just a bathhouse.”

“You’ll find out when you get there,” he said. “But just promise me that this stays between us. Nobody else finds out, okay?”

“Kavi—”

“Promise me.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, shaking my head. “I promise.”

He gave me a nod and didn’t push it further.

We rode back to the clubhouse in silence, and I spent the drive trying not to think about what exactly I was agreeing to or why he felt the need to keep it such a secret.

I wondered if maybe I was stepping into something illegal or going someplace that would get me into some sort of trouble.

But that didn’t sound like Kavi. He wasn’t the kind of guy to get mixed up in stuff like that.

Clearly though, whatever this bathhouse held in store for me, it was something Kavi didn’t want getting out. The curiousity was eating me alive.

I called ahead before I left the clubhouse, texting Chidi that I was taking personal time and wouldn’t be available until the following Monday.

I didn’t give him details. I knew he’d try to argue, would probably loop in Nadia, and the whole thing would spiral into a conversation about quarterly projections and client meetings.

Better to just cut it off before it started.

The drive to the warehouse district took longer than forty minutes in Saturday evening traffic.

I found myself gripping the steering wheel tighter as I got closer, my mind cycling through increasingly absurd scenarios.

What if this place was some kind of scam?

What if Kavi had lost his mind? What if I showed up and it was just a normal spa with eucalyptus steam rooms and cucumber water?