Epilogue
Three years later
“Would someone like to explain to me how this keeps happening?” I asked grumpily. When I was met with silence, I let out a heavy sigh and softened my voice. “No, I mean, really. Because I haven’t the faintest clue, and if we don’t figure it out soon, I’m going to lose my mind.”
From the screen in front of me, Angie’s voice piped up. “I think it’s a little late for that.”
“Wow, you’re hilarious,” I said brightly, my expression falling into a scowl. “Now, does anyone have anything productive to add? Or should I move forward with firing Angie?”
“You’re not firing me,” her voice said, and I heard her laugh.
“Maybe, but it’s tempting,” I said, looking around the room at the rest of my team and looking hopeful. “Come on. Someone. I don’t even care if it’s a bad idea or a crazy one, just…something.”
For whatever reason, Arete’s system had stopped kicking out error reports like it was supposed to.
When we’d upgraded the year before, I had expected we were going to run into problems, as always happened when you made sweeping changes to an established system.
Even when you worked hard, as all of us had done, to make sure everything went smoothly, you had to expect that something was going to go wrong.
It had gone off with surprisingly few hitches, and in the couple of weeks between seasons, we had patched the worst of the bugs and could start carefully combing through the code to prevent anything from returning.
So why did it take a year for the system to stop generating error reports while errors were cropping up at what we now could see was a slow but exponentially growing rate?
A good question, and here we were.
“I have an idea,” the newest addition, by about six months, piped up. Nick looked at all of us, even at the video feed of Angie from where she was working at home, the sounds of a fussy baby in the background, and winced. “It’s the old code.”
“The old code?” I began, then felt my heart sink. “You mean…the code we used as the foundation for everything?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” he said quietly, clearly not happy to present the idea, but hell, I had said to say something, even if it was bad or crazy. This wasn’t crazy, but it was bad. Very bad.
There was a pause, and after a moment, the crying from the screen stopped, replaced by happy gurgles, followed by Angie’s voice. “Sorry about that. Anyway, he’s got a point. We’ve done the analysis; we’ve combed through everything by hand too. The only thing we didn’t do was check the old stuff.”
“Because it was iron-tight, it was solid,” I said softly.
“Once, but it wasn’t just last year that we made changes,” she reminded me. “We’ve been doing extensive bug fixes and other patches since then; pretty much every week we’ve run something new through the system. And if I’m honest—”
“We were too focused on the new to remember to check the old,” I finished for her and closed my eyes. “Jesus, I knew this was going to be a problem. Shit, I really, really hope this isn’t a keystone issue.”
“Wouldn’t that be a blast?” Angie asked sarcastically, and then I heard her murmur to her son, who made soft noises at her.
Hearing it was a good thing, because having her work remotely had proved to be the best thing for her.
She was no longer trapped in a place where her talents and drive were put to good use, but meant she was a prisoner.
At least she could be home with her husband and their newborn, and she still got to give me shit occasionally.
“Alright,” I said, slamming my hands on the table, the thunk of my ring loud. “We’re going to break this down. Angie?”
“Yes, oh glorious master?”
“Start from the bottom and work your way up. When your shift is over, pick who you’re going to pass it off to, and then they’ll do the same. Nick?”
“Yeah?”
“Monitor what everyone is doing. You’ve got the freshest eyes, and that can make or break it. I’m going to keep an eye on all of you as you go, and I’ll do some of my own digging. I want notations and detailed note-taking, got it?”
They did, and I left them there, sending a message to the kitchen to make something nice for the team.
They could be as bad as me with eating when they were lost in their work, and I wanted them at their best. For my part, I was running on maybe two hours sleep, and I needed to take a minute to unwind or I was going to unravel.
I was contemplating going down to the resort proper and being among the guys, but as much as I loved them, the noise and chaos that always surrounded them was too much for my head at the moment.
Instead, I wandered into what was technically the Greeting Room and stood staring at the wall of pictures.
It was something I had done a couple of years ago, just a quick snapshot of the guys who had left Arete and had a story to tell, something that could show new Guests this place wasn’t just smoke and mirrors, it showed that we could walk the walk when necessary.
Someone had changed Cade’s picture, and I smiled at the picture of him and another former Guest, Walker, standing together at the Grand Canyon, their smiles wide.
Cade’s arm was tight around Walker’s waist, his metal leg gleaming in the desert sun.
It was funny to me that people insisted there was no magic in Arete, when these two, who had been separated for years, ended up here at the same time to reconnect… and fall in love.
Then there was Isaac, who was an even more special case than most of the people on the board, and not just because he had helped one of our long-term guests finally make a breakthrough, though that was a standout.
Half the year; he came to Arete to work as a Guide.
He was phenomenal, and his first success story had been one of our problem guests, Logan, who was also on the board, smirking at the camera, his boyfriend giving the peace sign as he dangled upside down next to Logan, both happy.
There were stories upon stories on the board, so many it was impossible to count, and yet I remembered them all. There weren’t any guarantees of success at Arete, but there were still plenty of successes, enough to keep me going whenever I wondered if we were doing enough.
“Hey,” I heard behind me and turned to see Luka, and beside him Rowan, who I swore looked less serious as the years went on. “Jesus, you look like shit.”
“That’s what happens when you spend the weekend working rather than shacked up in a swanky hotel with a boy toy,” I told him, raising a brow.
Luka rolled his eyes. “Go get some sleep or something, Reg, you look like microwaved dog shit. And if you don’t, I’m going to tell your boy toy.”
“Is that any way to talk about your boss?”
“Fine, your fiancé then.”
Damn him, he knew exactly how to distract me from my irritation and make me get all warm and fluffy inside. “You cheat.”
“Sometimes,” he said, turning and kissing Rowan. “Please remember to call me when you land, alright?”
“I will,” Rowan said with a shake of his head and a wink at me. “Take it easy, Reggie. Get some sleep, you do look like you need it.”
“At least someone around here has some tact,” I said as I walked past them and back into the administrative hallway. “Not me, but someone.”
I climbed the steps to Marc’s office and looked around, a little surprised to find it unoccupied.
I had spoken to Marc earlier, but I couldn’t remember him saying he was out of the office today.
Then again, he probably had told me, and my mind had been everywhere else.
Which went against our entire mantra for each other, but hell, neither of us could be expected to maintain it perfectly.
I knew that inevitably he would appear, so I took the only other door into what had been his private quarters and was now shared by us.
There was no point in hiding the fact that the two of us were together and we’d given it up within the first year of making things official between us.
It wasn’t as if we were violating some policy; we wrote the damned policies anyway, and there was nothing else in our way, so why not?
We didn’t broadcast it, but we didn’t hide it either.
As much as I hated to say Luka was right, and would never give him the pleasure of saying it around him, he was right.
I crawled into bed and shoved my face into a pillow.
I breathed deep, smelling that rich earth body wash Marc was so fond of, and smiled as I wondered how long a nap I should take.
I was supposed to be keeping up with the work I had just assigned to everyone else, but I wasn’t going to manage much if I was exhausted, so perhaps just a little—
The bed dipped, and I jerked with a grunt.
I didn’t need the drool on the pillow or the numbers on the clock to tell me I had fallen asleep; the haziness of my thoughts was all I needed to know that.
But then familiar lips were on mine, and I smiled against Marc’s mouth as he kissed me, gentle and slow, but deep as well.
Normally I couldn’t stand to be woken up, especially if there was no coffee on offer, but the hard press of his cock against my hip was a better promise than any coffee.
Sex had been what kick-started our relationship, and it was the thing we could still count on being good at.
He knew just where to drag his nails to make me squirm, where to lick and suck to make me gasp, and he knew just what angle to push into me at to make me cry out for more.
All those things he did after waking me from my planned but unplanned nap, and cry out I did as he filled me, the sensation as comforting as it was erotic.
We were more than just good sex, because we were partners in every sense of the word.
He knew when to go slow and when to bury himself in me with a snap of his hips, just like he knew how to let me rage when I needed it, or squeeze my knee when I needed to be grounded and comforted.
He was as good at making me cry out with his mouth wrapped around my cock as he was at coaxing a smile out of me when I wanted nothing more than to scowl or cry.
The day had felt like a complete failure and a waste of time, but when he came inside me, jerking me off until I cried out and spilled onto my stomach and chest, I knew it wasn’t a total waste.
I still had him, and even if he didn’t always realize it, he was eerily good at knowing what I needed when I needed it.
Which is why he held me close rather than our normal catlike lounging after a good bout of sex. Why he kissed behind my ears and told me Jude wanted us to visit him and his boyfriend, Teddy, over the summer for a couple of weeks, because he knew it would distract me from whatever was wrong.
“I love you,” I said as he was telling me about how he’d made Jude groan and plead not to tell the story about how he’d kissed me once and sent me into a short-lived meltdown that led to Marc’s leg being broken. “You know that?”
“Do you now?” he asked wryly, then caught himself with a pause. “Right, right? I love you, have for years, not like this, but I’m glad it’s like this.”
I smiled at his self-correction because old habits didn’t like to die, and they could hang on for years even when you worked on them.
And he had worked on them, not perfectly, and I didn’t think he was ever going to be the man who freely expressed himself…
and that was okay. I knew who he was when I agreed to be with him, and I loved him because of those things, not just in spite of them.
What mattered was that he had tried and was always trying.
I took his hand, feeling our rings slide over one another, and I smiled at the noise.
He had been so nervous when he brought up the idea of marriage, and I had laughed at him.
I wasn’t laughing at the idea; I’d quickly told him so that wounded look would leave his face, but at his reaction.
I understood, though, his first marriage had ended badly and well…
mine hadn’t exactly ended on a great note either.
“But that’s what makes it so great,” I’d told him as I put my hand over his and squeezed, wanting to kiss him but needing to speak first. “We should feel cursed about marriage, and yet, here we are, willing to try again.”
It had taken him a moment to realize I had agreed to marry him and the next thing I knew he’d tackled me into a chair and was hugging me tight as he promised over and over that he would be a good husband, that he was going to do better. That he would be there for me, no matter what.
“No matter what,” he whispered in my ear, as if reading my thoughts.
“Indeed,” I said, turning to kiss him and nuzzle his neck so I could breathe deep of the smell on him that was so much like the woods outside and something…so very him I could never quite name but never get enough of either.
“You’re here?” he asked, kissing the top of my head.
“I’m here,” I said as I sighed contentedly against his throat.
Because no matter what, the one thing we were best at when we were together was staying in the present. Sometimes it was all we had to get through a day or a week, and a couple of rough months there as well.
Just the present…and each other.