Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
Leo
The walk to Archie’s bedsit is exactly long enough for me to spiral through every conceivable emotion a man can feel about being sent to retrieve someone’s sex toy collection.
Embarrassment, obviously. That’s the baseline.
But there’s something else underneath it. Something I’m choosing not to examine too closely because that would require acknowledging that I’ve been thinking about Archie’s evening routine for the entire walk.
Archie. With his sharp wit and soft smile and that drawer full of—
Stop.
By the time I reach his building and climb the four flights of death-trap stairs, I’ve almost convinced myself this is fine. Just one acquaintance retrieving another acquaintance’s extensive collection of personal pleasure devices. Happens all the time.
The bedsit is exactly as I remember it, neat as a pin and furnished with the aesthetic of someone making do with what they have.
I approach the nightstand like it’s an unexploded grenade. Which, emotionally speaking, it might as well be. I pull open the second drawer and—
Yep. Still there. Still extensive. Still organized with a level of care that suggests someone takes their solo activities very seriously.
The purple one—the Destroyer, as Archie so helpfully named it—sits front and center. Substantial is definitely one word for it. Requires a safety briefing would be my description.
I grab it, then immediately drop it because touching it feels weirdly intimate.
Get a grip, Leo. It’s just a…dildo.
A very large, very purple dildo that innocent-looking Archie apparently owns. And uses. Regularly, if he needs it tonight.
My brain unhelpfully supplies an image of exactly that, and I feel heat crawl up the back of my neck.
Stop it.
I pick up the Destroyer again, more firmly this time, and deposit it in the canvas bag I brought.
Then I reach for the silver one, which is sleeker, more discreet, but somehow that’s worse because now I’m imagining Archie choosing between them based on mood, and the mental image of him lying on his bed, deciding tonight feels like a silver night—
My elbow catches the edge of the desk, and it wobbles violently. I have to put up a hand to stabilize it.
On closer inspection, the desk is missing a leg. But Archie’s made up for it by stacking large books underneath. I crouch to get a better look at the makeshift repair job.
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. The Quantum Theory of Fields by Steven Weinberg.
Gauge Theories in Particle Physics by Aitchison and Hey.
The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.
Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom. A spine so cracked I can barely read it turns out to be Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which I’m fairly sure most philosophy graduates don’t actually finish.
What the hell?
I stare at the stack of books, my forehead furrowed.
Some of these are serious academic texts. The kind that cost eighty pounds each and require prerequisite knowledge just to understand the table of contents.
Did Archie just pick them up at the charity store? Maybe a graduate student cleaned out their textbooks right before Archie just happened to be browsing for solid books?
I scan the spines of the books, and my confusion deepens. There are so many random topics here. Yet nearly all the books have Post-it notes sticking out of them, filled with annotations in the same small, cramped handwriting.
Why would someone who entertains at children’s birthday parties have books on reproductive fitness optimization and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle?
There’s not a single thriller or mystery book in this stack.
So Archie was telling the truth when he said he didn’t read crime dramas.
But what he does read provides more questions than answers.
I straighten, glancing around the bedsit with fresh eyes.
I’m starting to get the feeling that Archie Mansley is slightly more than he seems.
And I’m not sure if that makes me more curious or more concerned.
Now that I’ve straightened, I’m eye level with a corkboard. It contains a bus timetable with several routes highlighted, a loyalty card for the Thai place that’s two stamps away from a free entree, and a child’s drawings of a stick figure in a top hat labeled CAPTIN GIGLES in unsteady crayon.
But tucked away in the corner is a photo.
Ignoring the pulse of concern that I’m bordering on snooping, I lean forward to examine it.
The photo is slightly curled at the edges. It’s a picture of a beach. The light is too golden, the water too clear for anywhere in the continental US. It’s a stretch of sand that looks like it belongs in a travel magazine, with a sprawling resort visible on the cliff behind the photo’s subjects.
Two boys are standing in the foreground. The older one has his arm slung around the younger one’s shoulders in a way that’s half-protective, half-showing off, the universal body language of a big brother. He’s tanned, athletic, and grinning at the camera.
The younger one isn’t looking at the camera at all.
He’s looking up at his brother, squinting slightly against the sun, with the kind of naked admiration that makes my ribs ache.
He’s all limbs, oversized swim trunks, and messy hair, and there’s not a trace of performance in his expression.
Just a kid who thinks his brother is the greatest person alive.
I stare at the photo for a long time.
Because the older boy is Vaughn Mansley.
The resort in the background. The perfect beach. The snorkeling gear abandoned on the sand at their feet.
The Mansleys had money, the kind that pays for vacations in tropical places and doesn’t think twice about it.
And their youngest son is living in a bedsit with a three-legged desk and a loyalty card that’s two stamps away from a free pad thai.
I look at the photo again. At Archie’s face tilted up toward Vaughn. His unguarded and trusting expression.
Something cold moves through my chest.
Because I know what it feels like to look at Vaughn Mansley like that. I didn’t quite have a little brother’s adoration, but I had something adjacent—the relief of someone who’d been treading water alone and finally realized they’d found solid ground.
I was twenty-two and fresh out of college with anxiety about whether I was going to make it when I met Vaughn. He was twenty-five and already fluent in the language of QuantumTech. He knew the politics, the posturing, the unwritten rules that no one bothered to teach me.
He’d sought me out. That’s the part I still can’t fully reconcile. It wasn’t me who initiated the friendship. Vaughn had come to my desk one afternoon, leaned against the partition wall, and said, “You’re the one who flagged that vulnerability in the Chen-Martinez protocol, right? That was sharp.”
No one at QuantumTech had called my work sharp before. I was the quiet kid from Detroit who wore the same two shirts in rotation and ate lunch at his desk because he couldn’t afford the places everyone else went.
Vaughn started eating lunch with me instead.
He’d bring an extra coffee without being asked.
He explained the office dynamics, telling me who to pitch to, who to avoid, and why the Tuesday morning standups were actually where the real decisions got made.
When I stumbled through my first presentation to the leadership team, sweating through my only decent shirt, Vaughn caught me afterward and said, “Your idea was the best thing in that room. You just need to sell it like you believe that.”
I did believe it. I just didn’t know how to make other people believe it too.
So when I started developing the blockchain security protocol, an idea I’d been turning over in my head since my senior thesis, Vaughn was the person I trusted enough to talk through it with.
We spent late nights in the office with whiteboards covered in my diagrams and his questions.
He pushed me on the weak points, suggested angles I hadn’t considered.
I thought I’d finally found someone in the tech world who saw past the cheap shirts and the Detroit accent to the work itself.
Then, one Monday morning, I walked into the office, and Martin Zhao from the leadership team stopped me in the corridor.
“Nice work on Vaughn’s blockchain proposal,” he said. “He presented it on Friday. Really impressive stuff.”
I stood there long enough that Martin gave me an odd look and walked on.
I’d been out sick on that Friday with a stomach bug that had kept me in bed for two days. I’d texted Vaughn about it, and he’d sent back a get-well-soon emoji.
A get-well-soon emoji. While he was presenting my work to the leadership team, with his name on it.
I found him in the breakroom, stirring his cup of coffee.
“Hey.” He glanced up and smiled. “Feeling better?”
“Martin just congratulated me on my work with your blockchain proposal.”
The spoon paused mid-stir. Just for a second. Then it resumed.
“Right,” Vaughn said. “I was going to talk to you about that.”
“Were you?”
“The timing worked out. Leadership needed something for the quarterly review, and the proposal was ready. I made sure to position it as a team effort.”
“A team effort,” I’d repeated flatly.
“That’s how collaboration works, Leo.” His voice was patient. The voice of someone explaining something obvious to someone who should already understand it. “We developed the concept together. I had the relationships to get it in front of the right people.”
“You put your name on it.”
“I put it forward. There’s a difference. If I’d waited for you to present it, it would still be sitting on a whiteboard.” He set the spoon down and looked at me. “I’m not the bad guy here. I’m the one who actually made something happen with your idea. You should be thanking me.”
And here’s the thing that still burns eight years later.
I almost did.
For about three seconds, I almost said thank you.
Because Vaughn delivered those words with such conviction and easy authority that my first instinct was to wonder if he was right.
Maybe I didn’t understand how things worked.
Maybe it had been collaboration. Maybe I was the naive kid from Detroit who didn’t know the rules and was about to embarrass himself by making a fuss.
Vaughn saw me hesitate. And he went for the kill.
“Look, I get that you’re upset,” he said, dropping his voice like he was confiding in me. He pulled a chair out and gestured for me to sit.
I remained standing, my feet rooted to the spot.
“But think about this from a career perspective,” he continued.
“Leadership now associates this work with both of us. That’s good for you.
If I’d let you present it cold, with no internal support, you know what would have happened?
They’d have picked it apart. They’d have questioned whether a junior analyst had the experience to execute it. I protected you.”
Protected me.
He’d stolen my work and repackaged it as a favor.
“I want my name on the proposal,” I said.
“It will be. When we move to implementation, you’ll be credited. I’ll make sure of it.”
Of course he didn’t make sure of it. What he made sure of was that his version of events—generous senior colleague mentors promising junior, junior misunderstands the dynamic and gets territorial—reached every relevant ear before I had a chance to tell my side.
By the time I tried to raise it formally, the narrative was already set.
I wasn’t the wronged party. I was the difficult one.
The kid who didn’t understand how collaboration worked.
I lasted another four months at QuantumTech, and every day had felt like swallowing glass.
I never got to tell Vaughn what I actually thought of him.
Instead, I left quietly.
I started over with my career, taking a risk by applying for a job with Andrew. Andrew and I built NovaCore from nothing and turned it into something that made Vaughn’s stolen protocol look like a school project.
But my anger didn’t go away. It just went underground, settling into my bones.
I blink, and the bedsit comes back into focus.
The photo is still in my hand. Vaughn’s teenage grin. The total trust in Archie’s upturned face.
What happened to Archie to turn a kid vacationing on a tropical beach into a man living in a fourth-floor bedsit with fairy lights and a three-legged desk?
But now I’m standing in the middle of his bedsit, holding a canvas bag full of sex toys, with no idea what I’m doing anymore.
I carefully put the photo back where I found it.
I pick up the bag, lock up, and walk down four flights of stairs.
The London air hits me like a slap. It’s cold, gray, and indifferent to my problems.
I pull out my phone and text Archie.
Got everything. On my way back.
His reply comes in seconds.
Did you meet the Destroyer? I hope you don’t find it intimidating. Don’t worry, size isn’t everything.
I stare at the message, and despite the eight years of swallowed anger currently sitting in my chest like a fist, my mouth does that thing it often seems to do around Archie.
My lips curl into a smile.