Chapter Fourteen
Fourteen
The after-party that Shiv and his organizing committee have planned is exactly as I expected: loud, lavish, and bordering on the edge of ostentatious.
The lounge they reserved for the event is an homage to the Roaring Twenties, with gold geometric outlines in the ceiling, huge peacock feather centerpieces, and large, bedazzled posters of the burlesque performers who grace the center stage on most nights.
In lieu of that today, we have a live band, a buffet selection of heavy appetizers, and a significant fraction of the world’s interventional cardiologists gathered into one room.
“They really went all out,” I mutter.
“I know, right?” a voice responds.
I jump, but it’s just Leila, looking pretty and professional in a well-tailored pencil skirt, her hair up in a neat chignon.
Just a few hours before, she’d led a live video demonstration of a new Palette device with one of the interventional teams in a hospital in the north suburbs.
I’d watched not only to offer my support but also because she’s a genuinely good teacher.
“Oh hey!” I say. “Congrats on the demo, by the way. You did great. Are you already heading out?”
“Thank you, and yes,” she says. “Brandon’s not feeling well, so I figured I would say hi to the crew and head back home.”
My displeasure is definitely showing on my face, because Leila’s smile wavers some.
Brandon looked his usual sullen self sulking around the conference today; not at his best, but certainly not ill enough to drag his wife home to play nurse.
It bothers me, that on the evening when our section will most certainly want to celebrate Leila’s achievement, she’s leaving to take care of him.
There’s a part of me that should feel some schadenfreude—some part of Leila must have felt like she’d won when she stole Brandon away from his wife and child—but I see too much of my old self in her right now, too much of Eric in him, to let this slide without comment.
“You’re aware that he’s a grown man, right?” I grumble. “He can take care of himself for one night.”
In the dim room, Leila’s eyes gleam like polished stone.
“It’s fine,” she says. Her grin is back, big, bright, and brave. “I’ll see you Monday.”
She squeezes my arm, then prances toward the exit.
I catch at least one double take from people closer to her age as she goes, and the quiet simmer that I feel whenever I see her and Brandon together, the one that wants to shake him for siphoning this beautiful young woman’s youth, bubbles to a boil.
My phone lights up in my hand. It’s a text from Julian: I’m here. Near the stage.
I deflate. My hypocrisy isn’t lost on me, for as much as I can claim that Julian is peculiarly precocious, he is still half a generation my junior.
Anyone who looks at us together could easily cast the same judgments upon me that I am casting upon Brandon.
Today will be the first time I’ll be leaving myself open for them.
In a just world, I would have nothing to worry about—after all, most of my colleagues have brought their partners, and a quick survey of the room shows that Julian will not be the youngest of them.
He does, however, shine the brightest. It’s how I’m able to eventually find him in the crowded, dimly lit room; all I have to do is follow the paths of cheek-biting smiles and half averted eyes to see that he’s settled himself against a pillar near the stage.
I raise my hand to catch his attention just as a pretty woman with silken auburn hair approaches him.
Poor thing, I think. I can’t hear the exchange between Julian and this woman, but after how he’d dismissed Alicia at the farmer’s market, I have no doubt it will be painful.
As predicted, Julian turns a glacially indifferent glance to her before turning away in a physical rejection of her presence.
The woman whips away like she’s just been slapped, and I take on a brisk stride to close the distance between us before someone else can attempt to occupy it.
It’s been just under forty-eight hours since I saw Julian last, during our cold, nighttime dog walk around my neighborhood, but my mind has counted down every second until this moment.
It’s like he’s broken something inside me; I can hardly blink without being transported back to Thursday night, to the things he’d made me feel.
When he catches sight of me, his eyes darken, and I’m certain that he’s remembering too.
“Hi,” I say, a little shy. “Hope you haven’t been waiting long. Got caught in a session.”
“I haven’t,” Julian says. His hand drops to the nip of my waist, and in the dimly lit room, his eyes are almost black. They tick down my body. “Is this what you wore to the conference?”
I look down at myself. I’m wearing a simple sheath dress: formfitting, sure, but with the blazer that’s currently put away at coat check obscuring my shape for most of the day, hardly scandalous.
“Yes?” I confirm, and his hand squeezes. “Is there a problem?”
“No. Well,” Julian draws me just a little closer, bending to my ear. “yes, but I understand it’s completely unreasonable. It’s not like you can leave this body at home.”
I’m still trying to regain my composure when I hear someone call my name.
“Sean!” a voice says. “Get in here!”
It’s Shiv, beckoning me from across the bar.
The Broadview interventional cardiology crew is all here: Pamela, dressed to the nines in an iridescent sequin dress with the boldest blue eyeshadow I’ve seen her sport yet, Krause, Larry, even Haoran, who like me hardly makes it out for our section’s extra-clinical activities.
They’re gathering for a photo. Only Brandon and Leila are noticeably absent.
“One second,” I tell Julian, pulling out of his grasp and jogging to my team.
Shiv raises an arm to bring me in, but not before spotting Julian a few paces away and doing a double take.
“So you did bring a date!” he exclaims. Then, “Hold on. Don’t I know you?”
“Say cheese!” the camerawoman, Shiv’s wife, Olivia, says. I freeze, putting on a rictus of a smile, until the flash goes off and Shiv whips back to Julian.
“Yes, that’s right,” he says. “You were at Brandon and Leila’s wedding. You gave a speech.”
Julian quirks a brow in amusement, then offers a hand to Shiv to shake.
“Yes, that’s correct,” Julian says. “Nice to meet you. Julian.”
Shiv scans the room in bewilderment as if to say Do you guys see this? before finally taking Julian’s hand.
“Shiv. I work with Sean.” While Julian introduces himself to the rest of my colleagues, Shiv turns his attention back to me and throws his arm around my shoulders. “So you decided to try out the cougar life, huh? Good for you.”
I stiffen, then gently disengage from under his arm.
“How old is Olivia again?” I ask, knowing for a fact that she was twenty-three to Shiv’s thirty-six when they first met.
Shiv holds up both hands in a gesture of surrender.
“I didn’t say it was a bad thing,” he says, but the grin on his face is anything but apologetic.
His comment, spoken quietly, still has the effect of an airhorn.
By addressing the elephant in the room—the scandalous fact that Julian appears to be at least a few years younger than me—Shiv has ripped the bandage off a taboo topic and made it fair game.
The looks Julian gets change, going from curious or admiring to smug or dismissive, and I become a deviant.
It doesn’t help that the night has progressed, and everyone is one too many glasses in.
One woman, whom I recognize as an executive from one of the device companies, makes a comment about Julian’s obvious stamina.
An interventionist I’ve worked on papers with from a different Chicago institution refers to him as my boytoy as if he isn’t standing right there.
It’s ugly and intrusive, how suddenly the entirety of our relationship gets reduced to the sex that we’ve only really had once, how I can practically see people imagining the mechanics of our coupling when they greet us.
The double standard infuriates me. Of course I’d noticed how often women like Olivia and Leila are reduced to being their partner’s accessories instead of autonomous individuals with depth of their own, but there’s a level of acceptance for their relationships that isn’t afforded to Julian and me, despite our smaller age gap and similar stages in life.
A beautiful young woman is the just reward for a successful older man.
A beautiful young man with a successful older woman? Clearly a perversion.
Julian takes the barbs with thinly veiled amusement.
I tilt my head and tell the device executive outright that asking about my boyfriend’s prowess is deeply inappropriate, and she turns scarlet, blathers on about “just being curious” and how “things haven’t been the same since my divorce” before fleeing the scene.
When, annoyed, I inform the interventionist that my boytoy is actually an extremely successful angel investor, Julian interjects with a question about a biotech company that is developing a new design for percutaneous valve replacement that makes him raise his eyebrows, impressed.
“He’s a smart one,” Doug, the interventionist in question, tells me when their conversation winds down. Then to Julian, “What are you, one of those Silicon Valley wunderkinds?”
“He’s a genius, yes,” I say snippily. “Speaks over six languages, creates grants and opportunities for local creatives, invests in and mentors up-and-coming entrepreneurs on a global scale. He does what we all hope to do, which is make the world a better and more interesting place simply by being in it.”