Chapter 23 #2
His eyes bulge before Alistair interrupts us, and we all take our seats for a dinner I won’t be able to enjoy now that I know what waits on the other side.
Dinner begins only after Alistair takes his seat.
Forks remain untouched until his hand moves first. Wine waits in every glass until his is filled. Even the staff orbit his pauses, timing each course to the rhythm of his attention. He arranges gravity around himself and waits for the rest of us to fall into motion.
Jake does it better than anyone, and I can’t stop myself from watching.
He reads the table like code. Dae needs warmth, so Jake gives him a wink. Linus needs to be the funny one, so Jake tosses him an easy opening. Brad wants to fade into the scenery, so Jake never looks at him too long.
Alistair needs worship, and when dessert arrives—thank god, it arrives this time—Jake finally gives it to him.
“Alistair,” he says, voice turning slick with charm, “your success is legendary. I’d hate myself if I didn’t ask. When Query started growing faster than you could personally touch every part of it, how did you keep control?”
A groan moves around the table, but fuck me, this guy is good.
“Oh, God.”
“Not another founder sermon,” someone says.
Jake claps a hand over his heart. “This is mentorship. Show some respect.”
But Alistair is already smiling.
“Scale exposes weakness,” Alistair says, raising a finger to summon more wine.
“Most founders think growth means freedom. But growth breaks the illusion that any one person’s personality can replace structure.
The trick is knowing which parts require your hand and which parts require a system strong enough to act like it. ”
“Love a strong hand,” Dae says.
Brad’s shoulders bob in a silent laugh.
Jake doesn’t miss a beat. “And when the system pushes back?”
“Then you build a better system,” Alistair says. “Cleaner incentives. Tighter feedback. A company only becomes powerful when everyone inside it understands where pressure comes from and what happens when they resist it.”
Dae lifts his glass. “I suddenly love business school.”
Brad snorts into his wine, and Alistair giggles—actually giggles.
“The best founders,” Alistair says, warming to himself, “learn that control is less about touching everything and more about making sure everything still feels your hand.”
Jake scrapes his chair back from the table. The movement steals gravity like a stage light swinging his way, and he signals a staff member, who nods and disappears into the beach house. Jake circles behind Alistair, claiming his position, and the rest of us are reduced to watching.
The others track the shift with greedy eyes. They want the favor he’s gathering for himself. They want to be the one winning.
“If control is about the right hand, the right system, and the right instrument,” Jake says, voice lifting into a practiced flourish, “then we thought tonight deserved an instrument worthy of your hand.”
Alistair turns his face toward the spotlight Jake has built for him.
“We wanted to give you something special,” Jake says.
The staff member returns with a wrapped box that Jake presents with a bow.
Alistair tears into the paper, and his mouth falls open. A riding crop catches torchlight on the handle, glittering with stones.
Jake turns, bends, and drops his pants.
Someone gasps. Another cheers. I stare at Jake’s bare skin and feel my pulse trip over itself. Across the table, Alistair’s gaze slides to me and holds there, as if my reaction is part of the gift he’s just unwrapped.
The crop snaps, and Jake lets out a startled groan that burrows straight through me. He pulls his pants up, hugs Alistair, and murmurs, “Diamond-encrusted handle. We thought of you.”
“I love it,” Alistair says, still watching me before he looks at the others. “Thank you… all of you.”
If Jake planned all this alone, it’s a masterful hedge to pin it to the rest of the group.
Music erupts from hidden speakers, and everyone stands.
Jake returns to my side, and another staff member appears with a tray of champagne flutes, weaving through bodies in a transition they’ve clearly rehearsed.
Jake takes two and hands me one. He keeps finding me.
Now that I’ve seen him as the best player, being near him feels like proximity to power, and I have to get closer.
Whatever’s coming isn’t quite here yet, and under the cover of music, Jake and I carve out a pocket of privacy at the edge of the celebration.
I need to ask for his help. Really ask.
“You’re good,” I say.
Jake places a hand over his chest and bows. “To playing the game.”
“To learning from the master.”
He raises his glass to mine, but instead of clinking it, I catch his wrist and pull him closer so I don’t have to shout.
“I wanted to ask you something.”
For the first time all evening, his smile slips. The crack is brief, gone almost before I can be certain I saw it.
“Well,” he says, recovering, “that’s dangerous.”
“What is?”
“Asking me for help.”
A laugh escapes me. “Why?”
“Because in my ideal scenario, I can’t say no to you.”
The answer is like a sprinkle of water on some hidden part of me that’s parched enough to soak it up and demand more.
I study him, trying to reconcile the man from the beach with the man who stood behind Alistair’s chair presenting gifts and taking hits from a diamond-studded riding crop like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Why is there so much I want to say? I want to tell him he’s better than this place.
I want to ask him why someone as smart as him ever thought this was a good idea.
I want to ask whether he’d help me burn Alistair’s entire empire to the ground, but somewhere between yesterday and now, I’ve stopped knowing which parts of my fixation are for the story and which parts are just for him.
His gaze drifts over my face. “You’re thinking too hard.”
“Occupational hazard.”
“Mm.” His fingers settle beneath the bowl of my champagne flute. “Drink.”
He tips the glass toward me with gentle insistence, and I let him.
I drink because it’s expected, because he’s smiling, and because I came here intending to ask for his help.
The champagne hits my tongue wrong, bitter in a way the other glasses weren’t, but the flute looks the same.
Rich-people nonsense, I tell myself. A garnish I didn’t see. Some expensive botanical bullshit.
We’re close enough to touch, and this is the moment I’ve been wanting.
The music swells around us. Someone twirls Dae. Linus climbs onto a chair and nearly falls off it, laughing hard enough that one of the other guys has to catch his waist. The party’s unravelling should put me on edge after whatever the hell last night’s playtime was.
Instead, Jake steps closer. Close enough that I catch traces of his cologne beneath the salt air, and the knot between my shoulders loosens. If things go sideways again, he’ll take care of it.
Maybe that’s why I lean toward him instead of watching the room.
“Jake, I wanted—”
The bass crashes through the next song and swallows the rest.
At first I think that’s all it is: music, laughter, loud noise drowning me out.
Then the sound keeps traveling past the point where it should stop, stretching and warping like it has to move through water before reaching my ears.
I work my jaw to pop the pressure, but that only tells me the problem isn’t in my ears.
The torches all blur. The shadows thrown across the deck lengthen and twist, and when I blink, nothing sharpens.
Jake’s arm slides around my waist.
“You smell good,” I hear myself say, the words slipping out before I can catch them. Mortification tightens my skin, slow and delayed, like even shame has to fight its way through whatever’s happening to me. “I didn’t mean—”
His forehead settles against mine, his breath warm against my mouth.
“You smell good too,” he says softly. “And you’re going to be fine.”
Something’s wrong. The night’s supposed to devolve, not contort, and I haven’t had enough to drink to feel like this.
“I think—” My tongue drags through molasses. “Think something’s… wrong.”
Concern flickers across Jake’s face, or maybe that’s another trick of the light. My knees buckle, but his grip tightens and keeps me from hitting the deck.
I’m leaning on him now. More than leaning. He’s holding me up while my vision drifts past his shoulder to the bonfire below the deck, where the flames bend and ripple as if the whole world has gone liquid.
Must’ve had…
…too many.
The thought arrives in insufficient pieces, while Jake snaps his fingers toward the staff. The last thing I feel is the steady pressure of his arm around me, holding me safely in place while everything goes dark.