21. Killian
KILLIAN
The space thing was my idea and I’m beginning to resent myself for it.
Asher is on the couch in my office with his vodka and the expression of a man who has been quietly furious for two weeks and is running low on quiet.
Maddox is at the window with his whiskey doing what Maddox does when he’s trying to look like he’s not thinking about something, which is think very visibly about it while pretending to look at the view.
I’m at my desk with my scotch and the meeting notes I stopped reading forty minutes ago because the words stopped connecting to meaning somewhere around page three.
It’s been two weeks.
Two weeks of correct, appropriate, carefully maintained distance, and what it has produced is the three of us in my office at nine in the evening drinking in a triangle of mutual irritation while the woman we’ve all been giving room to spends her evenings elsewhere.
The right call. All of us agreed.
It is currently very difficult to remember why.
Two weeks ago I told myself this was the right thing to do and I believed it.
I still believe it in the abstract, the theoretical version of it where giving someone room is a generous and considered act.
What I failed to adequately account for was the practical experience of it, which is as follows: watching Killian Thorne conduct himself like a professional in every interaction he has with a woman he thinks about constantly, while Maddox performs casual disinterest badly enough that even the vendor staff have noticed, while Asher sends unsigned room service to her suite three times a week and then pretends he doesn’t know who sent it.
We are, collectively, a disaster. Three grown men in our forties and fifties sitting around acting like the world’s most overdressed teenagers and fully aware of it, which somehow makes it worse.
“She had lunch with him again today,” Maddox says, to the window.
“I know,” I say.
“Yesterday too.”
“I know.”
“And the day before.”
“Maddox.”
He turns from the window. “Why the fuck did we agree to give her space?”
“We’re fucking idiots, that’s why,” Asher says into his vodka.
“You need to stop,” Maddox says, pointing at him.
Asher looks up. “Stop what.”
“The Raphael commentary. You’ve said his name eleven times today and I’ve only been in the same building as you for three hours.”
“I haven’t said his name eleven times.”
“Ten. I might have miscounted.” Maddox drops into the chair across from the couch. “You’re obsessing.”
“I’m not obsessing. I’m observing.”
“You’ve observed him into double digits before dinner. That’s obsessing.”
“Says the man who had his assistant pull Raphael’s full employment contract this week to check his schedule.”
There’s a pause.
“Kyle is thorough,” Maddox says.
“Kyle does what you tell him.”
I set my scotch down. “Both of you.”
They look at me. I look at both of them and take a moment to reflect on the fact that between us we have built companies, negotiated with governments, operated in financial markets that would break most people, and we are currently bickering about an employment contract like a pair of jealous twenty-two year olds.
“Raphael,” I say, “is not the problem.”
“Raphael,” Asher says, “is currently walking our girl home for the fourth day in a row.”
“Our girl,” Maddox says, “is walking home because the three of us decided to give her space and took the fuck boy route, which itself is embarrassing as hell, keeping our contact with her at the bare minimum, and then executed that decision so thoroughly that she filled the gap with someone who actually shows up. That’s on us. Not him.”
The silence that follows is the particular silence of two men who know they’ve just been handed the correct answer and don’t enjoy it.
He’s right. That’s the actual problem and none of us have wanted to say it plainly. We made a decision and it was the wrong one, not in principle but in execution. We gave her so much room that we backed ourselves out of her orbit entirely and she didn’t stop moving just because we did.
He’s right and he’s also the one who booked a flight to Milan last week and only came back last night, so his standing to critique our execution is limited and I’m about to say so when Asher gets there first.
“You went to Milan,” Asher says.
“I had work.”
“You had work that could have been done from here. You left because you didn’t know what to do with yourself and you thought distance would help.”
Maddox opens his mouth.
“Did it help?” Asher asks.
A beat. “No.”
“No,” Asher confirms. “Because none of this is helping. The space isn’t helping, the distance isn’t helping, the room service I’ve been sending up without signing my name isn’t helping because she deserves to know it’s from me and I’m too busy being respectful to just go tell her I miss having her in the kitchen.
” He picks up his vodka. “We’re all acting insane. ”
He’s also right.
I’m fifty-one years old. I have been in rooms with extraordinary pressure for my entire adult life and I have always known what to do.
I have made decisions worth hundreds of millions of dollars with less internal deliberation than I’ve spent on a seating chart at the outdoor lunch tables.
The younger version of me, the version who built this vineyard from a failing property and a significant amount of stubbornness, would have handled this completely differently.
He wouldn’t have sat at a desk for two weeks constructing professional distance.
He’d have gone to her. Directly. No committee, no consensus, no careful framework of emotional consideration.
He’d have made it extremely clear that she wasn’t going anywhere and let her argue about it afterward.
I’ve spent twenty years developing the kind of restraint that apparently does not apply to Harper Brooks.
“We made a decision,” I say. “We made it with the right intentions and it produced the wrong outcome. We can either continue being correct about it or we can fix it.”
“How do we fix it without making her feel crowded?” Maddox says.
“We talk to her.”
“We’ve been talking to her.”
“Asher has been asking if she’s eaten. You’ve been texting emojis and borderline flirtatious one-liners at odd hours.
I’ve been conducting every conversation we have like a board meeting.
” I look at both of them. “That’s not talking to her.
That’s performing distance while pretending to maintain contact. ”
Another silence. This one’s heavier.
“So we stop performing,” Asher says.
“We stop performing.”
The south terrace comes into my sightline from the desk window and I’m not watching it, I’m thinking, I’m looking at the middle distance while I think, and it just happens to be the case that the middle distance contains the path from the boutique space to the residential suites and Harper and Raphael are currently on it.
He’s walking her back.
Her head tips back laughing at something, the full version, the real one that she hasn’t aimed at any of us in fourteen days, and Raphael’s shoulder is close to hers and his hands are in his pockets and he’s grinning and they look easy together in a way that lands somewhere in the center of my chest like a fist.
I set my glass down.
We agreed. Space. Don’t crowd the process. She’ll come to us when she’s ready.
She’s currently being walked home by another man and I have been patient for two weeks and I’m done.
The restraint. The consideration. The carefully maintained professional register. All of it can, as of right now, go directly to hell.
I pick up my phone.
I open the group chat. The one with all four of us. I type.
Killian: Raph had better not be going to your room if he wants to live to see sunrise, Harper
Maddox makes a sound behind me. I don’t look at him. I watch the window.
The three dots appear almost immediately.
Harper: Who is this?
I stare at those three words.
She knows who this is. She’s known from the first buzz of her phone.
She wants me to say it properly, to claim it rather than just assert it, to be the thing she’s been waiting two weeks for one of us to be, which is direct.
She’s going to make me work for it or she’s not going to give me anything, and she’s entirely right about that, and it’s the most Harper thing she could possibly have done.
Good. It’s good. I’m glad she’s not making this easy.
Asher has stopped pretending to drink his vodka and is reading over my shoulder. Maddox has his arms crossed with something on his face that is dangerously close to a smile.
Killian: You know who the fuck this is
Three dots. Gone. Three dots again.
Harper: You’re interested in my social life because???
I look up from my phone.
“Three question marks,” Maddox says.
“I see the three question marks.”
“She’s making you say it.”
“I know.” I type.
Killian: Come to my office.
A pause. Longer this time.
Harper: Is everything okay?
I watch the window. She’s stopped walking.
She’s standing on the path with her phone in her hand and Raphael has stopped beside her, looking at the screen with her.
He reads it and says something and she says something back and he laughs and she pushes his shoulder and he holds up both hands and keeps walking without her.
Good.
I look back at my phone. I look at Asher and Maddox, who are both watching me with the focused attention of men who have just watched something shift.
Two weeks of carefully maintained distance. Correct and appropriate and completely wrong.
Done.
Killian: Now, Harper.