The Heir's Disgrace (Doormen of the Upper East Side Book 1)

49. Olivier

It turns out love is fairly easy. I love Mallory, Elodie, Jeremy and even, for the most part, Matthew. They’re easy. They deliver affection the way I grew up expecting it. If they were the only people in my life, I wouldn’t have a care in the world.

It’s being in love that’s hard.

I don’t think I realize how deeply in love with Drew I am until I start to lose him.

His withdrawal is subtle at first. A smile that doesn’t make it to his eyes, a touch that doesn’t linger as long as I expect, silence where I thought he’d have a laugh.

It was after his father had a heart attack and then died in the middle of the night—that same night I held Drew in my arms because he wouldn’t let me go—that Drew shut down.

What I know, and what Drew knows, is he was planning to fly out at six in the morning. He would have been at the hospital by ten. No one could have known it would happen as fast as it did, which is easy for me to say, but even I felt like a fucking moron after Peggy got done scream-crying at Drew that he should have been there.

Drew traveled by himself for the funeral, which I understood. He’s not out to his family. They’ve never met me, he could only handle so much, and he wasn’t gone long. To be clear, I didn’t expect him to come back in good shape—fuck, at the time I was just praying he’d come back at all.

But he did, and he missed me, and he needed me, and I was there, the same way I’d been there for him the night he got the news. He said he wanted me. Needed me. And I think, in a way, he did—because fucking him so hard it hurt was the only way for him to get the rest of his hurt out.

Yet, with all that, slowly but surely, he disappears. Everyone—Elodie, Mallory, Jeremy—tell me to give him space, but my instincts are to crowd him. Stay in his face. Remind him to eat, to work out, to get out of the building from time to time. He does the things, goes through the motions. He kisses me back when I press, and every night begs me to go harder, like he’s trying to use me to exorcise all his demons.

He asks me one night if I can read his thoughts.

I say, “Sometimes.”

Because it’s not like he’s all that unpredictable.

But he doesn’t like that. His gaze, especially at night, grows suspicious. Angry. Wary. He pushes me away when I get too close. We stop having sex.

I chalk it up to grief. I give him the recommended space. It’s not like I have nothing going on. The wedding overtakes our lives—our info dumps on Mallory to help her finish the book become more frequent and last late into the night.

Drew starts taking long walks, and every time he leaves, I watch him walk out the door terrified I’ll never see him again. That this time will be the last time.

With the wedding less than a week away, Elodie and I are both in the living room with Mallory as her questions come rapid fire. She has a million blanks she needs to fill in—more commentary or details about certain events. What our thoughts are on some of the juicy tidbits she dug up in her research.

It’s three a.m. before I’m dragging my ass upstairs hoping to find a sleeping Drew and not a paranoid, wide-awake Drew.

But he isn’t in bed. The bathroom door is closed, and I hate that. We all know the kind of shit depressed people do when they’re in a bathroom by themselves.

I suck up my courage and knock on the door.

“Drew?”

No answer.

I press my hand against my pounding heart. My stomach flops in on itself. I try the latch, and the door opens.

The first thing I hear is his heavy breathing, and I know—no matter what—it’s going to be okay. He’s alive. I can work with anything as long as he’s alive, but in that moment, I promise myself I’ll never put myself through a moment like this again. He has to get help. He’s sick, and we all know it. I was a fool to think he’d get better on his own.

He’s sitting on the floor, his back against the vanity, staring up at me with that paranoid gleam in his eyes.

I remain in the doorway, not coming any closer.

He’s got his phone in his hand, and he’s sweating, breathing as though through a straw, in and out and in again.

“I love you,” I whisper to him across the distance I hate more than I can even describe.

He narrows his eyes.

“I love you so much, Drew. And I can’t read your mind, but I need you to let me help you.”

His breath stops suddenly. He’s silent for so long I wonder if he’s going to pass out. And then he gasps, hard, his phone falling from his hand and clattering to the floor.

“Olivier?”

“Yeah, I’m right here, babe.”

“You’re right here.”

“I’m right here, and I love you so fucking much.”

“I love you, too.”

“Will you let me help you? I promise I’ll never do anything to hurt you. Do you trust me?”

“You’re marrying her.”

Now, I know that isn’t what all this is about—I know that Drew fully understands the logistics of my upcoming marriage. He’s been in on the plan from day one. Fuck, he’s the reason we have a plan at all. And yet the words are the worst gut punch. This is grief and mental illness and a man at the end of his rope, and my guilt about knocks me over regardless.

I bite my lip to keep from crying. This is the most horrible situation I’ve ever faced. I would rather be homeless and living on the street with people spitting on me for the rest of my life than spend one more minute seeing the man I love suffering like this.

Being in love is hard.

All I have left is the hope that this love is worth it.

“Let’s get out of here,” I say, begging any god that exists for Drew to trust me one more time.

“I need help,” he says.

“Let’s get you some help, babe.” I hold out my hand, still not daring to take one step closer. This is the one step I’m praying he’ll take for himself.

Drew reaches for my hand and stands up.

A few hours later,I’m sitting next to him in an intake office trying not to throw up when the psychiatrist assessing him asks if he ever has thoughts of harming himself, and he says yes.

I might as well be carving out my own heart and stuffing it in his pocket as they lead him through the locked doors, because that’s where it’s going to be until he comes back to me.

Ifhe comes back.

I think, maybe, back in February, I should have let him go.

I’m not saying I thought I was the human equivalent of Prozac and offered him some sort of miraculous cure via my asshole and cock, but I did stupidly believe I made him happy. This, though—this is my fault. Because I couldn’t—I couldn’t let him go.

At some point I stopped being able to picture my world without him in it, and I think that happened way before I ever admitted anything like that to him.

Elodie waits with Mallory in the lobby of the private hospital where Drew will be getting treatment for his depression for the first time in his life. They fold me into their perfumed arms, and their long hair curtains my face while I finally allow myself to fall apart, my chest so empty and hollow, I don’t understand how I’m still alive.

“We don’t have to do it, Ollie,” Elodie whispers to me when there’s finally a break between my sobs.

As much as I know Drew didn’t wind up here because of the wedding, there’s a huge part of me that wants to take Elodie up on the offer to drop the act. Tell my parents the cold, hard, truth, and let the chips fall. What’s the fucking point of an inheritance if I don’t have him?

But Elodie is too important to me to hang her out to dry. We’ve only gotten half our advance, and it’s not enough for her to distance herself the way she needs to from her father. She needs me as much as Drew does. She needs my name, and she needs a safe place to live when news of the book comes out, which will be at the end of June. “I want to do it,” I say.

I want to burn the fucking world.

The Lafayette-Arnaud wedding is enormous,elegant, and sports a price tag north of two million dollars. An ostentatious display of wealth and status even I find disgusting.

I focus on the details of the day. Unable to contact Drew for seventy-two hours, I channel all my restlessness and anxiety—and rage—into putting on the performance of a lifetime.

Elodie makes an exceptionally beautiful bride in a custom Vera Wang gown with classic lines and a cathedral-length veil. I wear a white tuxedo with a white silk tie. I have two groomsmen—cousins I haven’t spoken to in years. Elodie’s maid of honor is Mallory. Her bridesmaids are also relatives whose names I didn’t bother learning. My best man is Jeremy, much to my parents’ irritation. Because “Who the hell is Jeremy?”

I want to tell them they’re lucky it’s not my former doorman who looks better than anyone on the planet in a tux.

But I just tell them Jeremy is important to me, and he won’t make a scene.

Once it’s legal, Elodie and I get drunk. We drink all the champagne, we dance to every song we know, we get photographed from every possible angle, and I’m relatively sure we don’t look like we’re in love—we look like we just got away with the crime of the century.

Because we kind of have.

She pulls me onto the dance floor for the last song of the night. I hold her in a classic dance pose.

“How are you holding up?” she asks.

“I’m pretty drunk,” I admit.

“Same. He’s gonna be so proud of you, Olliepus. You know that, right?”

I don’t know that. The thought hasn’t even occurred to me. I”m so scared for him—for us—I’ve stopped trying to even imagine a future.

“He loves you.”

“Yeah?”

“The way he looks at you. God… do you even know?”

I nod, my eyes misting.

“Can you forgive him?” she asks, shocking the hell out of me.

“What do you mean?”

“For not being perfect. For letting himself get so bad.”

“It’s not his fault.”

“It’s not yours either,” she says.

“El…” I start to pull away, but she locks me firmly in place. A tear slips down my face, and I stare at her like Great. Thanks for that.

“He’s gonna need for you to forgive him,” she tells me. “For you to trust him.”

I frown at her. “How do you know this?”

“You think I survived the death of a parent and my father without a few inpatient stints? Think again. He’s gonna feel like a burden. Like you’d be better off without him.”

“Fuck…can we talk about this later?”

“Just promise me to fight for him. You both deserve it. What you found is really special. I hope I find someone like you one day.”

The irony of my wife telling me that on our wedding night does not escape me.

“I promise. And I’ll never stop fighting for you, either.”

We spend the night at the Plaza, eating wedding cake and plotting our escape.

When we wake up, it’s to a press release.

The Secret Life of Socialites by Olivier Arnaud Elodie Lafayette.

And a text from my mother containing a screenshot of the Publisher’s Marketplace announcement with the message What the hell did you do?

Elodie gives my screen the middle finger and cackles. “Should we see if they’ll have us over for brunch after the honeymoon?”

“Hell yeah, we should.” Adrenaline pumping hard through my carved-out heart, I type out my response.

When we get home, why don’t you let us tell you about it over brunch?