Chapter 6 Miles
Miles
We don't talk about it.
We land, we deplane, we collect our bags from the overhead compartment.
Ray pulls both of them down before I can reach for mine, and I let him because fighting about luggage would require me to make eye contact, and I'm not ready for that yet.
I'm not ready for any of this. I am held together with caffeine and willpower and the faint hope that if I act normal long enough, normal will become true.
The shuttle from the airport to the resort takes forever.
We sit on opposite sides of the van. There are other conference attendees between us — two women in blazers discussing appellate procedure, a man on his phone talking too loudly about depositions — and I stare out the window at the mountains and do not think about Ray Garcia's fingers wrapped around my cock.
I don't think about the way he said come for me in the dark.
I don't think about how the spot where he mouthed at my shoulder throbs every time the van hits a bump.
I am here to give a presentation. I am going to make partner.
If I repeat it enough times it becomes a mantra, and mantras work.
They have to work, because the alternative is sitting in this shuttle with my assistant's come still under my fingernails — I washed twice in the airport bathroom, it doesn't matter, I can still feel it — and accepting that I have made the single worst decision of my professional life.
I glance at Ray. He's looking out his window too, earbuds in, relaxed. Like this is just a normal work trip. Like nothing happened. The ease of it makes me want to shake him.
The resort is gorgeous. I hate it immediately.
It's all stone and timber and floor-to-ceiling windows looking out at snow-capped peaks, and the lobby smells like cedar and expensive candles, and there's a massive fireplace crackling away in the center of the room.
Everything about it is warm and inviting and romantic, and I want to burn it to the ground.
Ray, predictably, loves it. "Holy shit," he says, pulling out his earbuds and looking up at the vaulted ceiling. "This place is insane."
"It's a hotel."
"It's a really nice hotel." He grins at me, and it's the first time he's looked at me directly since the plane, and my stomach flips in a way I refuse to acknowledge. "Come on, even you have to admit this is cool."
"I'll admit it when we're checked in and I've seen the presentation room." I walk to the front desk before he can say anything else, because if I stand next to him in this lobby for one more second I'm going to lose whatever composure I have left.
Check-in is efficient. The woman behind the desk is friendly and professional, and she gives me two key cards and directions to the conference wing and the ballroom where the gala is tomorrow night.
I nod and take the keys and head for the elevator with Ray trailing behind me carrying both bags, because apparently that's just what he does now and I've stopped fighting it.
The suite is on the fourth floor. I swipe the key card, push the door open, and stop.
It's beautiful. A sitting area with leather armchairs and a gas fireplace. A kitchenette. A balcony overlooking the mountains. And in the center of the room, dominating the space like a declaration of war, one enormous king-sized bed with a white duvet and approximately nine hundred pillows.
One bed.
"Huh," Ray says behind me.
"No." I walk in and set my key card on the counter and stare at the bed like it personally offended me. "No, this isn't right. I booked a suite. Suites have separate sleeping areas."
"I think this is the suite." Ray walks past me and sets the bags down by the closet. He looks at the bed, looks at the sitting area, looks at the bed again. "There's a couch. I can take the couch."
"The couch is five feet long and you're six-one."
"I've slept on worse."
"That's not the point." I pull out my phone and dial the front desk. It rings twice before someone picks up.
"Front desk, how can I help you?"
"Hi, this is Miles Covington in room 412. There seems to be an error with our room. We were expecting a suite with two beds or a separate sleeping area."
"Let me check on that for you, Mr. Covington." A pause. Typing. "I'm showing that room 412 is a king suite, which is what was booked for your party. Unfortunately, with the conference, we're at full capacity this weekend. I don't have any rooms with double beds available."
"Nothing? You're completely full?"
"I'm afraid so. I can have a rollaway cot sent up if that would help?"
I look at the room. There's barely enough floor space for a rollaway between the bed and the fireplace. It would be like sleeping in a trench. "That won't be necessary. Thank you."
I hang up and stand there with my phone in my grip, staring at the bed.
"So," Ray says. He's sitting on the edge of it now, testing the mattress, because of course he is. "One bed."
"I'm aware."
"It's a big bed. It's a really big bed, actually. We could both sleep in it and not even touch."
The word touch hangs in the air between us, and I see the exact moment Ray realizes what he said. His face cycles through multiple expressions and then he clears his throat.
"I just mean it's not a big deal," he says. "We're both adults. We can share a bed."
The casual way he says it snaps the last thread holding me together — the implication that what happened on the plane was just two adults being adults, or the fact that he's sitting on the bed we're going to share tonight looking relaxed and loose while I'm standing here with my pulse hammering and my shoulder throbbing and my entire life feeling like it's made of wet paper.
"We're not both adults sharing a bed," I say, and my voice comes out sharper than I want it to.
"You're my assistant. I'm your boss. We're at a work conference where my career is on the line, and we are not going to—" I stop myself.
Close my eyes. Breathe. "This is a professional trip.
What happened on the plane was a mistake, and it's not going to happen again. Do you understand?"
The room is very quiet. The fireplace clicks and hums.
Ray looks at me for a long time. He doesn't look hurt, exactly. He looks like he's seeing what I'm trying to hide and deciding whether to point it out.
"Yeah," he says finally. "I understand."
"Good."
"It was just a bed, Miles. That's all I was talking about."
He says it gently, and the gentleness makes it worse, because he's right. He was talking about the bed. I'm the one who made it about the plane. I'm the one who just admitted, out loud, that I can't share it with him without it being a problem.
I straighten my spine and go into logistics mode because logistics is safe. "The welcome gala starts at seven. That gives us about two hours to get ready. I need you in a tux and presentable."
"Wait, the gala's tonight?"
"Yes, the gala's tonight. Did you not read the itinerary I sent you?"
"I skimmed it."
"You skimmed it." I close my eyes. "Of course you did."
"Relax, I brought the tux. I'll be ready." He pulls his garment bag from the closet where he hung it and holds it up like evidence. "See? Prepared. I also brought backup cufflinks in case you forgot yours."
I didn't forget mine. But the fact that he thought of it, that he anticipated what I might need — I shove that away. "I'm showering first," I say, and grab my toiletry bag and my garment bag and close the bathroom door behind me before he can say anything else.
The bathroom is slate tile and amber lighting and a massive glass shower, and I lean against the door with my eyes shut and breathe. Through the door, I can hear Ray moving around the suite, opening drawers, humming something. The normalcy of it makes my teeth ache.
I strip off my sweater and catch my reflection in the mirror. I look wrecked — messy hair, circles under my eyes, and the bruise on my shoulder where Ray bit me, reddish-purple and unmistakable. I stare at it and feel two things at once: a hot rush of arousal and a cold wave of panic.
Below the bruise, lower on my torso, there's another mark.
This one is older. A thin white scar that curves along my left side, just below my ribs.
I don't usually look at it. I've spent years training my eyes to skip over it, the same way I've trained myself to skip over the things it represents.
But tonight, standing in this bathroom with Ray's bite on my shoulder and this scar on my ribs, every mark on my skin tells a story I didn't choose.
The bruise. The scar. The body that keeps betraying the life I built on top of it.
I turn away from the mirror and get in the shower.
The hot water helps. It loosens the knots in my shoulders and the tension in my jaw, and for about thirty seconds I feel like a normal person getting ready for a work event.
Then my brain offers me a replay of Ray's grip wrapped around my cock, and my body responds immediately, blood rushing south, and I press my forehead against the cool tile and will it to stop.
It doesn't stop. I'm hard and the water is running over my back and I can hear Ray on the other side of the wall, and I think about his voice in the dark saying tell me what you want and come for me and the steady stroke of his fist and the way he cleaned me up afterward, careful and gentle, like I was worth taking care of.
I turn the water cold. It helps, barely. I finish washing, get out, and dry off. I unpack my toiletry bag and line everything up — toothbrush, paste, face wash, moisturizer, suppressant case.
I open the case.
I already knew. I knew from the count at home. The pharmacy wouldn't approve an early refill, and I told myself I could stretch what I had. Take a half dose one of the days. Manage it.
But looking at the pills now, with the altitude and the travel stress and my body already doing things it shouldn't be doing — the low hum under my skin, the heat that hasn't gone away since the plane — the math doesn't work.
I'm one dose short. The alpha on the other side of this door is someone my body has apparently decided to respond to on a level I haven't experienced since before the surgery, before the suppressants, before I learned to shut all of this down.
I take tonight's pill. I have two left for two more days. If I skip the last morning, I'll be on the plane home before it matters.
It's fine. I've managed worse.
I close the case. I do my hair, brush my teeth, put on my dress shirt and trousers. I leave the jacket and tie for after — I'll need help with the cufflinks, and I'm not asking Ray for help with my cufflinks, so I'll manage.
I wrap the towel around my waist over the trousers because my undershirt is in my bag in the room and I didn't think to grab it, and I open the bathroom door.
Ray is on the phone. He's half-dressed with his tux pants on, white dress shirt unbuttoned and hanging open over his bare chest, feet bare on the carpet. He's pacing by the window with his phone pressed to his ear, laughing.
"—I'm serious, Dev, the bathroom is bigger than my apartment. I think there's a fireplace in the foyer. No, a different fireplace, there's one in the main room too. Yeah, it's stupid nice. I feel like I'm in a movie."
He turns around, still laughing, and sees me.
He stops talking. Just stops, mid-breath, his mouth still open.
His eyes drop from my face to my bare chest to the towel at my waist and back up again, and the look on his face is one I've never seen directed at me before.
Not from Garrett at the dinner, not from the alpha outside the club, not from anyone.
Raw and hungry in a way that makes my skin prickle everywhere his gaze touches.
"Dev, I gotta go," he says, his voice different now. Lower. "Yeah. Yeah, I'll call you tomorrow."
He hangs up without waiting for a response.
The room is very quiet. The fireplace hums. We're standing maybe ten feet apart, me in my trousers and nothing else, him in his open shirt, and the space between us feels like a live wire.
"I need my undershirt," I say, because I have to break the silence. "It's in my bag."
"Right." He doesn't move. His eyes are on the scar along my torso. I can feel him looking at it, and I fight the urge to press my palm over it. But he doesn't ask. He just looks, and then his gaze comes back up to my face.
"Your bag's by the closet," he says.
"I know where my bag is."
I cross the room and grab the undershirt and pull it on. I can feel him watching me the entire time, and I hate how much I don't hate it.
We finish getting dressed, back to back, not speaking.
I do my tie in the mirror by the desk. Ray buttons his shirt and fights with his bow tie behind me, and I watch his reflection struggle with it and don't offer to help because helping would mean standing close to him and putting my fingers near his throat, and I am not doing that tonight.
"This thing is trying to kill me," he mutters.
"It's a bow tie, not a python."
"Easy for you to say. You probably came out of the womb in a Windsor knot."
I don't laugh. But I almost do, and he sees it in the mirror, and he grins, and the tension loosens between us. Not all the way. But enough to breathe.
He gets the tie done. He shrugs on his jacket.
I put on mine. We stand side by side in the mirror and we look — god help me — like we belong together.
Him in his rented tux that somehow fits perfectly because the universe is cruel, his dark hair pushed back, his jaw clean-shaven for once.
Me in my tailored black, my hair in place, my face neutral.
"Ready?" he asks.
"Ready," I say.
We walk out the door and toward the elevator, side by side, and I don't think about the bed waiting for us when we get back. I don't think about the pills in the bathroom. I don't think about the way he looked at me in a towel like I was the only person in the room worth seeing.
I press the elevator button and wait, and my shoulder throbs under my shirt, and the hum under my skin gets a little louder.