15. Removing The Stick
Chapter 15
Removing The Stick
Archer
I stared at the legal brief on my laptop screen, the words blurring together. I’d been up since five, trying to focus on corporate law instead of replaying every moment from last night with Tessa on this very desk. The memory was like an itch I couldn’t scratch, a distraction I didn’t need right now.
My fingers flexed around my third cup of coffee, and it wasn’t even nine yet. I could still feel Tessa’s skin under my fingertips, hear the way she’d gasped my name, taste the sweetness of?—
“You look like shit.”
Evan’s voice jerked me back to reality. He leaned in my doorway with that insufferably knowing grin of his, the one that made me want to throw something at his head. Preferably something heavy, like the hideous phallic-shaped decorative paperweight he’d given me for Christmas as a joke.
“Did you need something?” I clicked randomly on my screen, pretending I’d been deep in concentration rather than deep in memories that were not appropriate for work hours. Or any hours, given our current situation.
“I wanted to check if you survived whatever kept you here until midnight.” He dropped into the chair across from me, making himself at home like he always did. “You left early too.”
I forced my expression to remain neutral, though based on Evan’s smirk, I wasn’t entirely successful. “I had work to do.”
“Uh-huh.” Evan leaned forward, studying me like I was one of his marketing case studies. And damn him, he’d always been too perceptive for his own good.
“I was reviewing contracts.” Not technically a lie. I had reviewed contracts. Eventually. After Tessa had left, I’d spent twenty minutes putting my office back in order and another ten making my dick deflate again. “For Stevenson, Blackwell, & Burke.”
The playful glint in Evan’s eyes dimmed, replaced by something that looked uncomfortably like disappointment. “You’re still taking cases?”
“Someone has to think about what happens after these two years are up.” I rubbed my temples, trying to ward off an oncoming headache. The same one that seemed to appear whenever we had this conversation. “The resort’s barely breaking even.”
“Your perception of breaking even is skewed. Maybe because half your attention is still back in corporate law?” There was an edge to Evan’s voice I rarely heard. It was serious in a way that didn’t suit him at all. “Gavin left us this place for a reason, Arch.”
“It’s not sustainable.” The words came out sharper than I intended, weighted with frustration and exhaustion and the lingering effects of last night’s indiscretion.
“And spending, what? Sixty to eighty hours a week as a lawyer is sustainable? At least with the resort, we split things three ways and sure, we do have to work more now, but once we get the hang of things, it won’t be so bad.”
“I don’t know why Gavin thought this would be a good idea.” I pinched the bridge of my nose, remembering late-night conversations in college when anything and everything seemed possible. “He probably thought we would all be old men when he passed or that he’d outlive most of us.”
There had literally been no explanation included in his will, and since Gavin had been estranged from his family, we couldn’t exactly ask them. He could have done it as a precaution until he had a family of his own.
“Or he knew we needed this.” Evan gestured around us, encompassing not just the office but the resort, the mountains, this second chance none of us had asked for. “All of us. Together. Like we planned before?—”
“Before everything went to hell? This isn’t some magical fix-it solution, Evan. It’s a failing business that’s eating up our time and money.” And my sanity, especially with Tessa around making everything more complicated.
“What’s failing?” Liam appeared in the doorway, looking irritatingly refreshed with his snowboard helmet under one arm and snowboard under the other. “Besides Archer’s attempt at maintaining a normal sleep schedule?”
“Nothing’s failing,” Evan said quickly.
“The resort,” I said at the same time, earning a glare from Evan.
Liam’s easy smile faded. “Ah. This conversation again.” He propped his snowboard against the wall and set his helmet down on the edge of my desk. “What sparked it this time? The profit margins? The maintenance costs? Or are we finally admitting that forcing three guys who can barely stand each other to live together was a terrible idea?”
“I was trying to tell him that Gavin thought—” Evan started.
“Gavin thought a lot of things.” Liam sighed, and for a moment I saw the weight of the past few months in his expression. “But he’s not here, is he? We are. Stuck in this mess because he decided to play puppet master from beyond the grave.”
The truth of his words hung heavy in the air. We were stuck—with the resort, with each other, with Gavin’s final attempt to fix what had broken between us years ago. The silence in the office was thick enough to cut.
And now there was Tessa, complicated and tempting and off-limits, making everything even messier. The memory of her on my desk flashed through my mind again, and I had to suppress a groan. This was exactly what I didn’t need—another variable in an already unstable equation.
“You okay there, Arch?” Liam raised an eyebrow. “You look like you’re about to snap that pen in half.”
I glanced down at my white-knuckled grip on my favorite Mont Blanc, forcing my fingers to relax. “I’m fine. Just tired.” And frustrated. And confused. And a little terrified of how quickly everything was spinning out of my control.
“Right.” Liam’s tone suggested he didn’t believe me for a second. “Well, while you two debate the meaning behind Gavin’s grand plan, I’m going to do something productive. Like throwing myself down a mountain at high speed.”
“We could call it quits.” I cringed as the words left my mouth, but it wasn’t like we hadn’t all considered it. The thought had kept me up more nights than I cared to admit.
Liam stopped at the door, turning back to face me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. “And then what? The resort and all of Gavin’s hard work go to waste? It’s not a money pit like you seem to think it is. Just because our expenses are high doesn’t negate the fact that the profit last year was almost three million and that if we sold it at the end of the two years, it would be life-changing.”
I could admit that three million in profit wasn’t necessarily failing, but all of the other bullshit made it feel like it. It was risky putting my life on hold and putting my trust in two men I’d stopped talking to a long time ago. All it would take is one of them to walk away before the two years were up, and it would have all been for nothing.
Evan cleared his throat and stood. “I need to go put the honeymoon suite that was just vacated back to how it was.”
“And I should?—”
“You should go snowboarding with Liam!” Evan was suddenly back to his old self.
I looked between Evan’s too-innocent expression and Liam’s raised eyebrows, recognizing the familiar tag-team tactics they’d perfected long ago. “Absolutely not. I have work to do.” A stack of invoices sat accusingly on my desk, each one representing another item on my endless to-do list.
“You mean you have brooding to do.” Evan was already moving to my desk and closing my laptop with a disregard for boundaries. “When’s the last time you went snowboarding?”
“Yesterday,” I lied, amazed at how he could still methodically dismantle all my excuses.
“Nice try.” Liam snorted, fiddling with the zipper of his jacket. “Your board’s still got dust on it from sitting in the equipment room since we got here. I should know—I organize that room.”
“Some of us have actual responsibilities?—”
“Some of us need to remove the stick from their ass,” Evan interrupted with that infuriating cheerfulness that made him impossible to argue with. “Go. Seriously. Whatever you’re working on will still be here in two hours, and you look like you’re about to have an aneurysm.” He wasn’t wrong, which only irritated me more.
Thirty minutes later, I found myself in my snowboarding gear and sitting next to Liam on the chairlift. The cold mountain air bit at the exposed part of my face, a sharp reminder that I’d rather be in my warm office right now, dealing with things I could control. Flying down a mountain was not my idea of control.
“You’re rusty as hell,” Liam commented as we ascended, the lift swaying slightly. “Your stance was all wrong during the practice run.”
“Thanks for the critique.” The boots were foreign on my feet, and the board dangling below us seemed to mock me with its presence, but it was hard not to think about how this felt like old times.
“You remember how to get off the lift without eating snow?”
“Fuck off.” But there was no heat in it. The crisp mountain air was already working its magic, making my stress, including certain desk-related incidents, feel distant.
“There he is.” Liam grinned, the expression transforming his usually serious face. “I was starting to think Corporate Archer had completely taken over.”
“Corporate Archer pays the bills.” I adjusted my gloves, wanting to focus on something else other than how much I’d let work become me instead of it just being part of my life.
“Yeah, but he’s kind of an asshole.” Liam squinted against the sun that transformed the snow into a sea of diamonds. “Remember that time when you convinced that ski patrol guy you were a professional snowboarder shooting a documentary?”
Despite myself, I laughed, the sound foreign to my own ears. “Nearly got us arrested.” The memory was crystal clear—Liam playing cameraman while I spouted ridiculous technical terms I’d made up on the spot.
Our conversation flowed easier than it had in years, memories bubbling up like spring water through ice. For a moment, it was like nothing had changed—like we were still those reckless college kids with more ambition than sense, before real life and real consequences had driven wedges between us.
“When you tried to teach Gavin that snowboard trick...” Liam’s laugh was tinged with nostalgia. “He face-planted so many times we started calling him the Snowplow.”
“And he kept getting up, determined to master it.”
“That was Gavin, though. Never knew when to quit. Kind of like how he never gave up on us, even after everything.” His words hung in the air between us, heavy with meaning.
“We’ve lost a lot of time. Time we can never get back.” The words scraped against my throat like sandpaper, and I had to force them past the unfamiliar tightness. Somewhere along the way, I’d forgotten how to do this—how to be real with people. “Maybe we all need to put in more effort.”
“Wow. If I had known strapping your board to your feet would finally get you to show some emotion, I would have done it sooner.” He sighed. “It's hard being here without him. Especially when we’re always bickering.”
“We’ve always bickered.” But I knew what he meant. Our once-playful jabs had grown sharp edges, designed to wound rather than tease. The ghost of who we used to be haunted every interaction.
“Speaking of bickering...” Liam said as we approached the top, “I think I’m going to ask Tessa out. Like, on a real date.”
The world tilted sideways. My board snagged on the off-ramp, and I stumbled like a first-timer, barely managing to stay vertical as we dismounted. The perfect metaphor for how those words had knocked me completely off balance.
“Whoa, you okay there?” Liam steadied me, his gloved hand gripping my arm. “We should check your bindings again.”
“I’m fine.” I shrugged him off with more force than necessary. “I lost my balance for a second.”
The roar in my ears had nothing to do with altitude and everything to do with the vivid memory of Tessa—the soft sounds she’d made, the way she’d melted against me, the taste of her lips.
“Right.” Liam’s eyes narrowed before he snapped his goggles down. “Nothing to do with me mentioning Tessa?”
“Why would that affect me?” I aimed for casual and missed by a mile.
“I don’t know.” His voice dripped with false innocence as we positioned ourselves at the starting point. “Maybe because you had your tongue down her throat a few days ago, and now you’re acting weird anytime she’s mentioned or anytime you see her.”
Was I really that obvious? I’d spent years perfecting my poker face, and here I was, being read like a picture book.
“I’m not acting weird.” The words came out strained, like they’d been squeezed through a vice. “She’s our employee. I’m maintaining professional boundaries.”
“Is that what we’re calling it? Because from where I’m standing, those went out the—” He paused, and I could practically see the pieces clicking together behind his goggles. “Hold up. Did something else happen between you two?”
“We should focus on the run.” I cursed myself for leaving the safe haven of my office. “Unless you’re scared I’ll show you up even if I’m a bit rusty.”
“Oh, it’s like that?” Liam’s grin turned predatory, reminding me of countless competitions in the past. “Game on, Blackwell. But this conversation isn’t over.”