Olly
“Wait,” I called out. Panic flared in my chest. I hadn’t imagined that Keaton would actually try to leave.
Keaton stormed away from me without looking back. He reached out for the door handle. I was quicker. I grabbed his elbow and spun him to face me. We were close in the hallway. Keaton was almost pressed up against the door. There was no way I was giving any ground.
“Let me go,” he snapped.
“I told you,” I said. I leaned forward and pressed one hand against the door above his head.
He wasn’t leaving right now even if he turned and grabbed the door handle again.
Not until our conversation was over. “This was the deal we made. You have dinner with me tonight. Then you get to decide whether you quit or not. The work day is not over.”
“Then tell me what’s going on, right now,” he retorted. I bent my head over him. He was small like this. Exactly the kind of small I could fold up so easily in my arms. Just the right height to lay his head on my shoulder.
I smiled. I noticed again how uncomfortable that seemed to make him. He wasn’t used to it. My fault. I had to be the boss at work. I forgot sometimes to be a person as well. “It’s pretty simple,” I said. “Caleb and I played together. We’re old friends.”
I watched him trying to work it through his brain. He wrinkled his nose. It was the most adorable little movement. His glasses shifted on his face. “But… you’re…”
“Rivals?” I suggested. “Enemies?”
He nodded. “That’s what everyone says. That’s what you say.”
“Is it?” I asked. But I wanted to put him out of his misery. I truly did. There was no benefit to stringing it along any further. “We’re not rivals. We’re old friends. We’re just rivals in public to give the media something to talk about.”
Realization slowly dawned in Keaton’s eyes. “To stop them talking about other things,” he suggested. “And so that you can catch out people who would try to play you against each other.”
“Exactly,” I said. I locked eyes with him deliberately. I had to duck my head to get him to stay connected. I dropped my voice. “That information doesn’t leave this room.”
Keaton shivered. A pink flush spread up his cheeks. That was… unexpected. “I won’t tell anyone,” he said. There was a beat of silence. A half-hysterical laugh bubbled up out of his chest. “It’s not like anyone would believe me if I did.”
“Hm.” I raked my eyes over his face one more time. He seemed genuine. I could see the freckles across his nose much more clearly this close up. His wide eyes behind the lenses. The way his lower lip trembled slightly.
Why was it trembling?
I had an urge to reach up and touch that lip. Still it. Soothe it.
Meet it with my own.
“Why are you showing me this?” he asked. His voice was nothing more than a whisper.
“It’s not a joke,” I told him. “You’re not a joke.”
“So…?”
“This is me letting you into the inner circle,” I said. “This is your reward.”
“For what?” he asked.
My eyes flicked down to his mouth again. His lips looked bitten. Like he chewed them as a nervous habit. I’d seen him bite down once or twice when he was concentrating.
I wanted to bite down on him. Fit my teeth into the marks left by his. Feel him squirm under me.
“For staying,” I told him.
“I didn’t…”
He wasn’t going to stand there and tell me he hadn’t decided to stay yet. I wouldn’t give him the chance. Not even if it meant losing the opportunity to capture those bitten lips.
I pushed away from the door and turned. “Come on,” I called over my shoulder. “Aubrey is a fantastic cook. You don’t want to miss dinner.”
We sat down in our places. I was relieved that Keaton followed me obediently. I had silently hoped that he would: he always responded well to a direct order. He was too polite and well-mannered to keep arguing with me in front of our hosts.
Aubrey had spirited another full place setting from somewhere. I knew it wouldn’t be a problem for me to turn up with a guest unannounced. She always made too much. Ace sometimes joined me – maybe five times since he had joined the company. He was inner circle.
Now Keaton. That made two.
“How’s your knee, old man?” Caleb asked.
He clearly didn’t want to draw attention to what had just happened.
He was talking like everything was normal.
Only Aubrey and I knew him enough to hear the current of tension under his voice.
He was the host and he was trying to restore balance to the table like a good host should.
“My knee is fine,” I told him. I shot him a dirty glance for good measure and he chuckled. “How’s your shoulder?”
He winced. He rolled the offending joint backward twice. “Stiff, honestly. My physio has me doing these exercises, but they don’t seem to work. Nothing really does.”
I nodded. “That’s the way.” My own knee had never really recovered. An injury that was bad enough to end a career was not much fun to live with afterward. I would always be just a little stiff.
I shot a glance at Keaton. He was staring at his plate. Bewildered.
“Do you have any allergies, honey?” Aubrey asked. She stood behind Keaton’s chair and laid one hand on the back of it. “Or anything you don’t eat?”
Keaton blinked up at her. “Um, no,” he said. He was deep in his own head. I don’t think he’d even noticed her coming to stand beside him. “No, I eat pretty much anything.”
“That’s good,” she smiled. “Though, I’d be happy to change up my cooking if you needed it. Now, you boys don’t just talk shop, you hear me? There are other things in the world than sports management.”
Caleb and I scoffed at the same time. “Like what?” I asked.
Aubrey shot me a meaningful glance and tipped her head down at Keaton. My heart stuttered for a second. Thank god he couldn’t see her from the angle his head was at.
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out,” she said. She turned back towards the kitchen to begin serving the food.
“You know, Keaton, this guy here was the one who brokered my first-ever sponsorship deal,” Caleb said conversationally. Keaton’s eyes swiveled to him. “That was back when we were both playing together. We came up on the same team.”
Keaton nodded automatically. “The Crowhill Cove Crows.”
“Has he been bragging around the office?” Caleb grinned. “I was on the verge of going pro and Olly here had his first knee injury.”
“Don’t say it like that,” I interrupted. “Tell the truth.”
Caleb rolled his eyes. “Fine, I gave him his first knee injury,” he said. “An accident in training. He was all riled up about something and forgot that you don’t try to go up against a brick wall with pure force alone.”
Keaton’s lips twitched upwards at the edges. “You’re the brick wall?”
Caleb nodded. “That I am. So, this guy, he’s sitting in bed for weeks resting, and he hates it.
I’m visiting him now and then and bringing him gossip from the locker room, and I tell him about this company that wants me to wear their stuff for my social media posts.
He immediately tells me that I’m not doing it for free – I didn’t even think it was the kind of thing you could get paid for – and negotiates a deal on my behalf. ”
“And you spent the whole lot on a night out for the team,” I recalled with a shake of my head. “One of the most brutal nights we ever had to recover from.”
“And you weren’t supposed to be having alcohol with your pain pills,” Caleb chortled. “We had to carry you out of there. Me and Thornton, you remember? No, I guess you don’t – you were out cold. We were the only ones on the team that could pick you up.”
I shook my head at the memory – or lack thereof. Probably not the best thing to reveal to my innocent secretary. I glanced at him.
He was looking back at me.
Looking at me in a way that seemed completely new.
Maybe it was good for him to hear these stories.
“People think I hate Caleb because of the knee,” I said. “And because he stopped being my client when he started his own firm. We just didn’t argue with the reports.”
“Hell, that was the funniest of the lot,” Caleb said. He chuckled again. “You were the one who helped me become a manager. Even set me up with my first client. We’ve never been rivals. Only teammates.”
I smiled at the term and nodded. I reached for my glass. It was filled with water only. Caleb had been a heavy drinker when his career first ended. I had no problem with sticking to water to support him. I raised the glass in the air in salute and took a sip.
“Who’s hungry?” Aubrey asked. She was walking back into the room with a huge dish in her hands. Steam and an incredibly pleasant aroma rose from the top.
Caleb and I raised our hands at the same time. Like schoolboys.
And we laughed.
Keaton walked ahead of me and got into the car while I was still saying my goodbyes. Aubrey whispered a warning to me about letting him get away. I nodded a promise not to be the same man I always had been. As if there was a way I knew how to keep it.
I got into the driver’s seat beside him and buckled up. He was staring pensively out of the window.
“Keaton Dunbar,” I said. The magic spell of his name at least brought his attention back to me.
“What?” he asked. Not rudely. Not loudly. Quiet and almost sad.
“The food was good,” I said. It was a statement. Designed to test the waters.
“Yes,” he agreed and looked out of the windshield. “I… I don’t think I thanked Mrs. Coleman properly.”
“I think she’d allow you to call her Aubrey.”
“Right.” Keaton swallowed. “Sorry, Mr. Harvey.”
I half-smiled. Was he fishing?
“We’re not at work,” I told him. “Your obligation officially ended with dinner. You don’t have to call me Mr. Harvey.”
He peeked at me from the corner of his eye. “… Oliver?”
I barked a laugh. “I’ve never been Oliver.”
He must have heard what they called me. Caleb and Aubrey. Ace. He knew.
He cleared his throat. “Olly.”
The sound of it was like a guitar being strummed. A note of my favorite song. The favorite song I hadn’t heard yet.
I cleared my own throat and started the engine. “I wanted you to know the truth,” I said. I wasn’t one to talk just to fill a silence. I certainly wasn’t one to explain myself. Why did I feel the need to do both? “Not everything is as it seems.”
“I’m gathering that,” Keaton said. He fidgeted silently for a moment as I drove us back to the road. “I still don’t…”
I shot him a look of alarm. No. Surely? “You should know something else,” I told him. I hadn’t wanted to part with this secret. But if it would make him stay… “Something I don’t reveal to anyone. Not even Ace.”
He paused. Whatever he had been about to say was gone. For now. “Are you sure you want to tell me?”
I hated the implication in his words. That I might not want to trust him if he was only going to leave me anyway. He wasn’t leaving. Not if I had anything to say about it.
“I can’t understand numbers,” I said. I ignored his question. Better just to get to the point.
I could feel him staring at me as I focused on the road. “What?”
“I can’t understand numbers,” I repeated. I couldn’t look at him. Not just because of the road – I didn’t want to see his face. “They’re meaningless to me. It’s called dyscalculia. Like dyslexia for math. I have to have… cheat sheets.”
I could almost hear the moment of realization. Keaton turned to look through the windshield again. “The notes I put into your desk drawer when I tidied up.”
“I need them,” I told him. My voice sounded too plaintive. I hated it. But I couldn’t bring myself to shut down and hold everything in close control again. Not right now. Not when Keaton was at stake. “If I don’t have them and a call comes in…”
“You can’t give them the right numbers,” Keaton said. He slumped a little into his seat. “Oh, god. That was so stupid of me. I’m sorry.”
“It wasn’t stupid,” I said. “I overreacted.”
“You reacted completely rationally,” Keaton said.
“I just – I didn’t know the context. I made you panic.
I’m really sorry. I won’t ever do something like that again.
And if you need help with numbers but you don’t want to let anyone know, you can always ask me.
I’m actually pretty good with them. I don’t mind helping.
You can even pretend you’re testing me, or something, if that helps. ”
The meaning behind his words struck me in the chest like…
Like a giant college teammate slamming into me and knocking me to the wrong angle on a weak knee.
“I can always ask you?” I repeated. My hands gripped the steering wheel tighter. I didn’t dare to look at him or let myself smile. “You’re staying?
Keaton sighed. He turned to look out of his side window.
“I’m staying.”