Chapter 20
MATTHEW
Bringing Troye to my office had proved to be a huge miscalculation. Not a mistake, because that implied regret, and there was nothing about him or the things we did that I’d ever regret. But I hadn’t considered how sucking him off in my office would affect me in the long run.
My office was now a place where I knew no peace.
Though it was days later and any actual trace of him had vanished, I could still hear him.
Smell him. Every time I looked up at my door, he was there, pink-cheeked and glassy-eyed.
The memory of it haunted me, and I resigned myself to the fate of running a company perpetually half-hard.
It was worse when I was alone in my office with the door shut, so I’d started leaving the door open more often.
Which was why Jett found it so easy to waltz in and close it behind him.
Not that he needed an invitation anyway.
He was my best friend and my business partner.
We’d met in college, just two kids with more audacity than common sense and dreams big enough to sink us if we let them.
We didn’t. Partly because we were lucky. Partly because Jett was a genius. Partly because we didn’t sleep for the first ten years of Gemstone’s history. Now at forty, with our company solidly dependable, and a great team around us, Jett and I could afford to relax a little. Theoretically.
Jett strode over to the couch that was pushed up against the wall. The couch I absolutely had thought about fucking Troye over the back of, but hadn’t. Yet. He took a seat like he didn’t care if I wasn’t currently paying attention to him and was half in my own head about Troye.
There had always been something about Jett that was calming.
Something that made it impossible for me to keep secrets from him.
He was steady and still, with the patience of a saint.
So when it took me almost fifteen minutes to give up the ruse of me actually doing work and acknowledge his presence, he didn’t even blink.
“What can I do for you?” I asked instead of blurting the contents of my mind like a Catholic repenting for things I didn’t believe were sins.
Jett didn’t even bother raising an eyebrow at me, and I was rolling my eyes at myself.
I knew why he was here, and he knew why he was here, and he wasn’t going to leave until I talked.
I’d been dodging him since I got back from my business trip.
Normally, we shared everything, but I’d wanted to hoard Troye like a treasure and keep him to myself.
The truth was that I feared what Jett might have to say.
I worried he wouldn’t approve of how quickly I’d grown attached to Troye or how deeply I felt for him.
But Troye and I clicked in a way I hadn’t expected.
It certainly hadn’t happened before. It was like every relationship I’d had before was slightly out of tune.
Too sharp. Too flat. Not fast enough. Too fast. But with Troye, everything was effortless.
It was magic, and I wanted to keep that to myself for as long as possible.
But it had been too irresistible to bring Troye here that day. He’d loved the tour. We’d gone to the art department, and he’d watched them storyboard some of the scenes for an upcoming game. We walked past the programmers, whose work was less flashy but crucial to the company.
I wasn’t that surprised when a few people recognized him from his channel, and at first they wondered if he was here for some sort of collab.
It was clear that some of my employees had a bit of a crush on the man they knew as SilentHowl, and to my credit, I didn’t fire them for making eyes at him. Though it was close.
“I like him, okay.” I sighed and shoved away from the desk, my chair rolling across the floor.
“I didn’t say a word.” Jett smirked, the bastard. He could be such a smug fucking dick sometimes.
“Remind me why I’m friends with you.” I scowled at him and folded my arms over my chest, mirroring his body language.
“Because I’m gorgeous.”
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
“A lot of the office was beholding your boyfriend the other day.” His smirk softened into something less humorous and more genuine. “He seems nice.”
“And yet I sense a but coming.” Jett and I were great together because we had totally different ways of looking at life.
We literally never saw eye to eye, and we were familiar with finding common ground in between our opposing points of view.
But I already hated whatever it was he was going to say about Troye.
“How did you meet?”
“It was the most random thing in the world.” I filled Jett in on the flight being overbooked, the little kerfuffle we’d gotten into on the plane, and the result of being stranded.
Jett didn’t seem convinced. “Random that one of the most popular streamers just happened to have you thrown off a plane, shared his hotel room, and now is feeding you ideas for a game, but won’t sign a contract with you to protect himself—or us.”
“I’m not sure I like what you’re saying.” I used my feet and pushed against the floor, rolling my chair farther away from him, creating more distance so there was less of a chance of me launching myself across the room at him.
“I’m just saying, a popular streamer with a large following is giving you ideas for a game. And what happens when that game comes out, and he claims that we stole those ideas from him? What happens when he sues?”
“He wouldn’t. You met him once. You don’t know him the way I know him.”
“Matt, it’s barely March. You hardly know him the way you think you know him.”
“I know he’s a good person. I know he wouldn’t do whatever it is you think he’s capable of doing.”
“And I know that you’re usually an intelligent man, but you’ve gone dick blind.
Have him sign a fucking release, Matthew.
That’s literally the bare minimum that you need to do to protect this place.
” Jett let out a sigh and his arms dropped from his chest. He leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees.
“Look, I know you like him. I can see it. The whole office could see it. You practically pissed on his leg when Travis tried flirting with him.”
“I might have if it wouldn’t have been an HR nightmare.” I took a deep breath and tried to see things from his point of view. “Look, I know you’re right. And I’ve tried to hire him on for the project to do things all official and shit, but he’s been hesitant to the idea.”
Jett’s frown deepened. “That makes me nervous, Matthew. How much of the concept you floated to me was his idea?”
“All of it. The whole thing is his brainchild. I’ve all but begged him to sign on as a consultant.”
“And he won’t?”
“He’s worried that working for me will affect our relationship. It’s new, and we’re both in pretty deep, I think.”
“Or he’s planning to wait until the game goes live so he can sue our asses off for theft of intellectual property.”
“Or,” I said, gritting my teeth, “you’re an asshole who’s way off base because of his own bad experiences with people.
Troye isn’t using me, and he’s definitely not some sort of spy or saboteur who has a master plan to ruin us.
” Anger had taken hold of me. Never before had I wanted to punch Jett in the mouth as much as I did in that moment.
We’d disagreed plenty of times about countless things, but this time it was personal.
Troye wasn’t some sort of bad actor that Jett was worried about him being.
Jett rose to his full height, his shoulders pulled back, making his already broad chest seem even wider and more intimidating.
He didn’t mean to be. He was just naturally as broad as a door and thick like a barrel.
Most of the time his size didn’t faze me.
Today it gave me pause, and I scowled at him.
“Don’t start puffing up at me, Jettrey.” Using his full name was a way to remind him that he was being an asshole. Jett was my friend, he was the virtuous Dr Jekyll and Jettrey was Hyde, the monster who lived inside.
Jett deflated, but the hard edge remained in his eyes. He was deadly serious about this, which meant that I owed it to our partnership, our friendship, our company, to take him seriously.
“I’ll talk to him, okay. I’m taking him to dinner tonight, and I’ll lay it all out for him.
” I hated the idea. I knew that Troye was a good person who didn’t have some sort of ulterior motive, but Jett didn’t know that.
And legally speaking, it made sense to protect Troye as well as protect ourselves.
“You know I don’t want to be right, don’t you?” Jett ran his hand through his hair. He was looking increasingly sheepish, which was par for the course after he realized that he’d tried to use his size to intimidate me.
Jett’s upbringing hadn’t been the best, and until he hit his senior year of high school, he’d been a scrawny, gangly, too-skinny teen unable to defend himself against his father, who was built broad and thick and was just as mean as he was wide.
And though he didn’t mean to, and he worked hard not to, Jett’s defense mechanism was to puff up and make himself bigger.
Because once he’d finally gotten big enough to rival his father’s size, the beatings had stopped.
He’d done a lot of work to try and deprogram himself so he didn’t default to being large and scary to get his own way when he felt threatened, but the fact he’d reverted back to that behavior was enough to make me understand I had to take him seriously.
Jett had put himself through college with scholarships and part-time jobs. He’d scrimped and saved and worked his ass off. This company was his baby. Our baby.
“I promise, I’ll either sort out a release with Troye, or I’ll scrap the project and brainstorm in-house. You should take the rest of the day off.” I clapped my hand onto his bicep and gave it a squeeze. “I know it’s hard on you when you get all puffer fish on people.”
Jett scowled at me, but there wasn’t any malice in it. “I hate you.”
“You don’t.”
“No, I think I really do. Just when I think you can’t possibly irritate me more than you already do, you prove me wrong. Puffer fish? Really?”
“Look in a mirror and tell me that I’m seeing things.”
Jett’s scowl intensified, etching lines deep into his face. His eyes narrowed and if looks could kill, I’d probably drop dead. “So much,” he said. “I hate you so much.”
“You adore me.”
“Not really,” Jett said, not meaning it, and he left me alone in my office to think about the conversation I needed to have with Troye.