Chapter Two #2
From there, everything became about him.
I don't resent him for that. I need to make that distinction, even in my own head. Michael didn't ask me to bury anything for him. He didn't know there was anything to bury.
I did that.
That was the deal I made with myself somewhere around thirty thousand feet without ever putting it into words.
He gets a childhood. Whatever is left of one.
He gets school and friends and birthdays and someone who remembers to buy groceries and sign forms and make sure he isn't spending every waking hour wondering whether the last people he has will disappear too.
And I get to keep moving.
As long as I never stop long enough to feel any of it.
Turns out that's not how trauma works.
Inconsiderate, really.
I've been through enough therapy in the years since to understand the fucked-up wiring better than the actual therapist by the second session.
I can name the mechanism, diagram the avoidance, tell you precisely why control became the thing I reach for whenever the ground shifts beneath me.
I know why being sexually dominant makes my body feel safe.
I know why surrender requires a level of trust I almost never have available to give.
Very insightful.
Gold star.
None of which changes the single inconvenient fact currently making it impossible to answer my emails, which is that the itch is back, insistent and familiar, and I know myself well enough to know it isn't going anywhere until I find somewhere safe to put it down.
“Are you homosexual?”
Ms. Monroe's question lands like a record scratch and snaps me clean out of my dark spiral and back into the conference room, where I have clearly been staring into the middle distance long enough to miss the run-up to it.
I turn my head and look at her.
She's perfectly serene, pen poised over her notebook, like she's just asked whether he prefers still or sparkling.
Then I look at Michael.
His entire face has gone to stone.
I turn promptly toward the window to hide the smirk that has absolutely no business existing in a meeting this important.
“No, Ms. Monroe. I am not gay.”
The words come out clipped and glacial, the exact tone of a man being asked this question for the second time in two days, because I asked him the same thing yesterday at his place after the footage broke and got served the identical frosty response.
There's something deeply restorative about watching someone else field it for a change.
“Understood.” Ms. Monroe makes a note.
That's it.
No awkwardness. No apology. No not that there's anything wrong with that. She simply collects the information and moves on while Michael sits there looking like he's reconsidering every decision that brought him into this room.
I like her.
I make a genuine, professional effort to stay connected to the discussion as she moves through her prescription for rehabilitating my brother's public image.
The list, as far as I can follow it through my hangover, includes cleaning up his social media presence, limiting unsupervised public appearances, several strategically boring charitable engagements, acquiring a girlfriend and, I am not making this up, getting a pet.
Nothing says upstanding citizen wrongly photographed nude in a public fountain quite like a golden retriever and a woman willing to be seen holding his hand.
I glance toward Jackson.
He catches my eye from farther down the table and raises one eyebrow.
I press my lips together.
Do not laugh. This is serious.
“Ms. Monroe.” Michael leans back in his chair. “No disrespect to your efficiency, but that plan's a little too on the nose. It screams cliché. Overdone. And considering you're the best at what you fucking do...” He actually punctuates the words with air quotes.
Air quotes. In a board meeting.
I slowly lower my pen.
What the fuck is he doing?
“I'd assume you'd know that's the oldest trick in the proverbial book,” he continues, “and come back to me with something containing at least a shred of originality.”
I stare at him across the table.
Why the fuck is he being like this?
It's his mess. His bare ass currently playing on a loop across every local news channel in the city, his name trending beside phrases that should never appear anywhere near the CEO of a multibillion-dollar company, and he's sitting here treating the woman we're paying a fortune to dig him out of it like she's the one who stripped him down and tossed him into the fountain herself.
I cut him a glare sharp enough to get his attention.
Michael sees it.
Ignores it.
Interesting.
“Mr. Sullivan, there's a reason it's overdone,” Ms. Monroe says, completely unruffled. I have to give her that. Most people would've started packing a bag somewhere around the air quotes. “It's overdone because it works when it's executed properly. I am, however, entirely open to your suggestions.”
“My only suggestion is that you go back to Houston and find another corporate carcass to circle.”
Silence drops across the table.
I close my eyes.
Good fucking hell.
When I open my eyes again, Ms. Monroe hasn't moved. Her expression hasn't changed, and for half a second I think the insult rolled straight off her.
Then I see it.
A small flinch. Barely there, gone almost before it registers, but I catch it. Her fingers tighten around her pen and then release, her face settling right back into that perfectly composed mask.
That's the line that does it for me.
I have spent my entire adult life cleaning up after Michael Sullivan, and God knows he's given me plenty to work with, but I have never once watched him be deliberately cruel about it. Reckless, yes. Arrogant, absolutely. Occasionally so far up his own ass I've considered charging him rent.
But cruel?
No.
I open my mouth to say something I'll probably have to apologize for later, but Jackson gets there first. He rises from his chair with that maddening calm of his and crosses to the conference room door before the temperature can climb any higher.
“Could you excuse us for a moment, Ms. Monroe?”
She doesn't say a word. She simply gathers her notebook and walks toward the door, but when she passes me, I catch the slight tremble in her fingers.
She's good.
Very fucking good.
I'm positive she would rather cut the hand off than let any of us see it shaking.
And that makes me even angrier at my brother.
The door closes behind her and the room erupts.
Everyone starts talking at once, the entire board piling onto Michael at full volume.
Frank is demanding to know what the hell he was thinking, someone else is reminding him how much we're paying her, another voice cuts across both of them about professionalism, and I'm somewhere in the middle demanding to know when exactly he lost his fucking mind.
Voices, power and money all crowd into the same airspace.
None of it lands.
Michael isn't arguing.
He isn't telling anyone to go fuck themselves. He isn't defending what he said or doubling down on it, which would at least be familiar territory. He isn't even looking at us.
He's sitting perfectly still with this glossed-over look in his eyes, staring somewhere past the conference table, past the windows, past all of us.
And just like that, I'm not angry anymore.
Because I know that look.
I haven't seen it in a very, very long time.
Never wanted to see it again.
“Bennet.”
Nothing.
My stomach drops.
"Bennet," I say, louder, with a bit more bite.
His head snaps up.
The room starts to quiet as he looks around at all of us, blinking once like he's only just realized we're here. Every furious face around the table is turned toward him, waiting for an explanation, which he doesn’t give.
“Please excuse me for a moment.”
His voice is perfectly calm.
He stands, buttons his jacket like his body is still in the room while the rest of him has gone somewhere else entirely, then walks out.
Nobody says a fucking word.
I look at Jackson.
He's wearing the exact same what the fuck just happened expression I can feel on my own face, but the second our eyes meet, his changes.
He knows.
Not what happened. Neither of us knows that.
He knows what I need.
I don't have to ask him to go after Michael. Don't have to explain that if I follow right now, Michael will see his big sister coming and immediately start trying to convince me he's fine. Don't have to say any of it.
I just look at Jackson.
He gives me one nod.
Then he's out the door after my brother.
Marcus: I'll be at your house by 5:30. Leave the door unlocked and let security know to let me in.
Stacy: Ok. See you soon.
I set my phone on my desk and lean my head back against the chair.
It's been a shit show of a day, even by the standards of a Monday, and Mondays already owe me money.
It started before I'd even cleared the elevator this morning.
Frank was waiting, as I knew he would be, all five-foot-three, bald and pudgy inches of him strutting out ahead of me and throwing an arm toward his office like he was directing traffic. He might as well have been holding a leash and clicking his tongue.
“Marc. My office. Now.”
I followed him in and shut the door, but I didn't bother taking the chair.
“My daughter tells me you didn't come home last night.” Frank rounded his desk and lowered himself into the ridiculous leather throne he insists on calling an office chair. “Have we not discussed this numerous times? Do I need to remind you what's at stake here?”
My jaw tightened, but I kept the rest of my expression where it belonged. I folded my arms over my chest and leaned back against the closed door.
“A friend needed a hand.”
“A friend.”
“Yes, Frank. That's generally what we call people we have friendships with.”
His eyes narrowed.
I knew I was pushing buttons I shouldn't push, but fuck, I'd had enough of his power-play bullshit before breakfast.