9. LARRY
9
LARRY
I stare at the email from Kyle, but I don’t really know how to respond to it if I’m entirely honest. Do I apologise that he’s feeling unwell? I want to offer sympathy, but given that he ran out of here without a second glance yesterday, I’d say he probably doesn’t have any desire for that from me. Not now. Not ever.
“You okay?” Peter asks, looking through the gap in the partition and catching my eye. How he’s already become an expert at spotting when I’m not alright tells me that I need to work on masking my feelings while I’m here. Every poker player has a tell, and apparently I’m screaming my emotions to anyone within viewing distance.
“Kyle… Mr Carter… isn’t coming in today,” I say. “What do I…? What do I do in this situation?”
“Aha, crisis number one,” Peter says, hopping to his feet and wandering around to my side of our little desk bank. He looks over my shoulder at the computer screen. “He really is a man of very few words, isn’t he?”
“I’ll say,” I reply.
“Okay, this is easy,” Peter replies. “You just ask him if he needs you to move or cancel things. See what he wants from you and go from there.”
I blink. “It’s really that simple?” I ask.
Peter snorts. “You’re allowed to ask questions, Larry,” he says. “You don’t need to know everything right off the bat. Who hurt you?”
That’s not a question I can answer without breaking down so I laugh it off and thank him. He heads to his desk again and I await the response from Kyle. When it finally comes through, it is once again rather short, but I try not to read into it and assume it’s because he hates me.
Larry,
Good shout on pulling meetings. Anything that’s external, please take me off it. Let Taylor know I’ll be on for our catch-up, but broadly, pull things from today.
Best,
Kyle.
Why is it that when someone just puts “best” it sounds like they’re saying “fuck you?”
I reread the email.
“Pull things from today. Fuck you, Kyle,” I say, mimicking the intonation of “best.” I chuckle and get to work.
I then check the guidebook Peter wrote for me and start booking rooms for the next couple of weeks, paying special attention to the rooms he notes are the nicer ones, and occasionally asking him which rooms to use for certain externals.
I can feel myself getting into a rhythm, booking the catering for the ones that need it, and making a note of the ones I can just pop out and get coffee for if need be.
“You don’t always want to use the coffee we’ve got here,” Peter says. “Especially if we’re trying to impress. Although we have decent coffee, the clients will be expecting something fancier from Jolts, but if you need baked goods, McAllisters is a good shout. They reopened pretty recently but the pastries are unmatched.”
I keep note of everything he’s saying, adding to the folder where I can, putting in little Post-its, turning the whole thing into my own personal guidebook. Having it makes me feel automatically steadier, like I’ll figure this out, like the only thing standing between me and this job being the best thing that could possibly happen to me is Kyle.
Kyle. I shake my head as he drifts into my mind, as I remember the way he looked at me in the office yesterday, the stark contrast to how he’d looked at me in the gym locker room. I’d gone from being looked at like a prime cut of steak to something he’d just scraped off the bottom of his shoe.
Such a fall from grace.
I get a couple more emails from Kyle, and towards the end of the day they’re starting to become a little more verbose. I’d go so far as to say they’re almost kind. But then he disappears offline and I don’t hear from him again.
“You’ll figure it out,” Peter says out of nowhere, and I realise my face has given me away all over again. “It’s only day two. It’s not all going to fall into place straight away.”
“I know,” I say. “Just want to do well.”
“Well, from my perspective as a fellow assistant, I’d say you’re doing pretty great,” he says. “So don’t overthink it. Though I get the impression that’s a pretty difficult task for you.”
“Jesus Christ, Peter, you cut me deep,” I say.
“Sorry, just a guess.”
Peter tells me to go home when we hit five thirty. Most of the office has left already, and the only reason he’s still sticking around is because Mr Howe doesn’t usually leave until it’s gone seven p.m.
“Kyle isn’t here,” he says. “And if he’s offline, you’re not going to be hearing from him until tomorrow. Go home. Rest up. Back at it again tomorrow.”
I grab my things and make my way out of the office, saying goodbye to the people whose names I’ve not yet committed to memory, and having a little chat with Maria before I make my way out onto the street.
I head in the opposite direction from my flat, heading to the shop to grab some food. I consider going to the gym tonight, safe in the knowledge that if Kyle is sick, he probably won’t be showing up. Though from the way he looks, two workouts a day wouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility.
Stop thinking of him like that. He’s your boss. You can’t keep thinking of his fantastic chest, his big arms, his huge ? —
I shake my head. Really can’t be thinking of him like that. Not anymore.
I decide I’m actually going to cook tonight, maybe even something that means I’ll have dinner for tomorrow night, or even a lunch. This is the kind of person I want to be—the kind of person who batch cooks, who does meal prep. That’s who I want to be.
When I’ve paid, I head out onto the street, wandering slowly through town and checking out the sights before I make my way home. The evening is warm, the kind where I wish I was one of the people sitting out on the terraces of these restaurants, dining with a friend or a lover. One day that will be me again. Sadly, I’m in the headspace to be jumping into another entanglement of some kind.
I walk past Dean’s, a cutesy, family run Italian restaurant in town that I am dying to try, and stop dead as I see a familiar face in the window.
You have got to be kidding me.
It’s Kyle. Mr Carter. Whoever.
He’s sitting across from another handsome guy, probably about the same age as him, with dark hair and a dark beard. They look like the perfect little couple, and the way they’re laughing, the way they’re enjoying themselves, the way the entire world seems to vanish around them just makes me feel like shit.
I slept with him. I got off with this man in a steam room and now he’s out on the town with someone who I can only assume is his boyfriend. Kyle reaches across and puts a hand on the other man’s hand, giving it a quick squeeze before going back to his meal.
I feel sick. My heart absolutely falls out of my feet. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe this is happening to me.
I don’t know how long I stare, but long enough to see that this man he’s with is everything I can never be. He’s confident, he knows himself clearly, and he’s not a blubbering wreck around Kyle. They belong together. And I’m his assistant. And that’s how it should stay. Right?
I walk away, suddenly feeling a million times worse because I had his dick in my mouth this morning, and I’m the other man—and there’s nothing worse than feeling like the other man. I mean sure, it’s not my fault. I didn’t force him to cheat on his partner. But fucking hell, it makes me feel like shit.
I’ve been cheated on, and I wouldn’t wish that on anybody else. Why would I? It sucks.
I need to talk to someone. I can’t go back to my flat and stare at those four walls, I’ll drive myself insane. Or drive myself back to Grindr.
I pull out my phone and call the only person I know in this town, the only person who I think will be able to help.
“Larry?” Rosemary answers, many questions in her voice. “What’s up?”
“Are you about tonight?” I ask, barely managing to hold myself together.
“Yeah, I’ve just got home. Is everything okay?”
“Not really,” I say.
“Okay, then I’m opening wine. It’ll be breathing and ready to pour when you arrive.”
I blink. “You really do that?”
“No, I have no idea what it means, but hurry up,” she says.
Apparently my face is giving away everything I’m feeling, because Rosemary’s welcoming smile as she opens the door very quickly vanishes and is replaced by a look of concern. I clearly do not look good right now.
“Okay, wow, we may need more than one bottle of wine. Let me just put another one in the fridge,” she says, ushering me inside.
She pours me a glass of pink wine and sits me down on her sofa, fixing me with her best listening face and hearing me out as I recount the trauma of the past two days.
“Okay, so why did you call me?” she asks. “Did something happen after work? You said Kyle wasn’t even there.”
I sigh. “I just saw Kyle in town,” I say. “He was having dinner with a guy, and they looked pretty chummy.”
“Oh?”
“Like, they were holding hands, laughing with one another,” I say. “It looked like it was a date to me.”
Rosemary winces. “Oh babes, I’m so sorry,” she says. “I mean, how sure are you?”
“Pretty sure,” I say. “I mean they weren’t kissing or anything but it just looked really freaking familiar. Laughing. Joking.” I sigh and I realise how pathetic I seem right now. “And they were holding hands.”
Rosemary sighs. “Okay, so maybe they are a couple,” she says. “I’m sorry. I mean, you weren’t… You didn’t like him or anything, did you?”
“No. God, no, that’s not it at all,” I say. “I just… I hate the idea that I’m the other man. That he’s with this guy and I was just some bit on the side. It makes me feel icky.”
“Okay, let’s look at it this way,” Rosemary says, sitting up a little bit straighter. “You’ve done nothing wrong here. You saw a hot guy in the steam room at your gym, he made a move, and you took that move and went with it. You had no reason not to follow it through. You were just… well… you were thinking with your dick, but he gave you no reason not to.”
“I don’t want things to be awkward, though.”
Rosemary smiles at me, placing her hand carefully over mine. “It’s you, babes, it’s almost certainly going to be awkward,” she says. “But maybe you just need to let him know tomorrow that you’re not going to out him or anything. Just let him know that while you don’t agree with it or whatever, you’re not about to get him into trouble. That might clear the air.”
I nod. She’s making sense, the kind of sense I was struggling to make of this myself. Thank goodness for Rosemary.
“Alternatively…” There’s an evil little glint in her eye. “You can give as good as you get.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, just be professional with him,” she says. “You don’t have to tell him you’re going to let it all slide, you could just show him. Plus, it’ll give him a taste of his own medicine.”
It feels a little bit mean-spirited, but then there’s a small part of me that enjoys it as an idea. What if I did that? What if I was just overly cordial with him?
“He’s clearly a prick,” she adds, which almost makes me choke on my wine. “But he’s the prick who means you can start your new life here. So you’ve gotten off to a rocky start. The only way from here is up.”
“Thanks Rose,” I say. “You’re the best.”