Chapter 1
Prologue
Darius wasn’t surprised by Adrian’s choice of restaurant. In many ways Adrian had learned nearly everything from Darius, the dark wood, the serious wine list, the hush that made the conversations conducted in it hold more weight. What Darius hadn’t known, until three days ago, was that this was the same room where Adrian had sat with Jake Sullivan and Cole Ramirez and laid out the plan that would dismantle everything Darius had spent over a decade building. Darius had learned that detail from his assistant, who had learned it from the maître d’, because Dallas was that kind of city. That Adrian had chosen this room for that meeting, and then chosen it again for this one, may have hurt Darius even more than Adrian’s act of betrayal itself.
That first dinner had been about strategy. This one was about something older and considerably more difficult.
Darius was already at the table when Adrian arrived. He had a glass of wine in front of him, untouched, and a controlled stillness that signaled to Adrian that this conversation was going to be even more difficult than he’d imagined. He looked up when Adrian sat down. Neither of them spoke immediately. Twenty-five years between them had many textures, but this was one they’d never experienced before.
Adrian ordered. He took his time. Then he looked at Darius directly, which was the only way he knew how to do anything that mattered.
“I owe you an explanation,” he said. “More than one.”
Darius looked at him. “You owe me considerably more than that,” he said. His voice was entirely level, which was, as Adrian knew, the most dangerous version of Darius. “But start with the explanation.”
Adrian started with the professional piece. Hargrove, the restructure, the decision to support Jake’s elevation to CEO rather than defend Darius’s tenure. He laid it out with the same precision he’d brought to the boardroom, because anything less would have been an insult. He said that Hargrove had the leverage to act and the plan he’d built with Jake was the only viable counter. He said he’d arranged the landing as carefully as he could, and although Adrian would replace Darius as Chairman, Darius would retain a seat on the board, his legacy preserved the company saved.
Darius listened. His face did nothing.
“You built that plan behind my back,” Darius said, when Adrian finished. Not a question.
“Yes.”
“For months. While sitting on the Forrester Board, my Board. While I introduced you to every person in that room as my oldest friend and the man I trusted most in any professional context.” He paused. “While I was the one who brought you in to begin with.”
“Yes,” Adrian said again. There was no useful elaboration.
“Marcus told you,” Darius said quietly. “Twenty-five years ago, on a sidewalk in Manhattan. He told you there were two things that mattered to me above everything else. Do you remember what they were?”
The weight of it landed between them. Adrian held it.
“I remember,” he said.
“Personal loyalty,” Darius said. “That was the first one. He told you I valued it above everything else. He told you he’d seen what happened to people who violated it.” He looked at Adrian with an expression so flat, so unreadable, it was frightening. “You violated it in the most public way available. In front of a Board of Directors and an activist investor and a room full of people who will be telling this story for the rest of their careers.” He picked up his wine and set it down without drinking. “So that’s the professional thing.”
“And the other thing,” Adrian said.
Darius was quiet for a moment. When he spoke his voice had dropped, which was worse than the flatness. “I gave you Jake Sullivan,” he said. “I gave him to you the way you gave things to me, because I saw something in him that he couldn’t yet see in himself, and I trusted the one person in my life who I believed could help him find it. I trusted you with the person I was most responsible for.” He paused. “I did not ask you to seduce him. I did not ask you to make him your project. I did not ask you to spend twelve months opening doors in that man’s life that were not yours to open and then hand him to his subordinate like a…” he stopped himself. “I asked you to mentor him. The way I mentored you.”
“I know,” Adrian said.
“And instead you did to him what I did to you,” Darius said. The sentence arrived in the room with a weight that neither of them had been prepared for. Darius heard himself say it and went still. “You took the most private thing I ever gave you and you used it on the person I trusted you with. Without asking. Without telling me. Without…” He stopped again. His jaw was doing something that Adrian had never seen it do in twenty-five years.
“Darius…”
“Don’t.” The word was quiet and absolute.
He stood. He picked up his jacket. He looked at Adrian one more time with an expression that contained, alongside the fury and the betrayal, something else, something older and more exposed than either, something that had lived for a very long time and was now, in the devastation of this moment, briefly visible.
“I brought you in because of what we are to each other,” Darius said. His voice was barely controlled. “I need you to sit with what you did with that.”
He walked out of the restaurant without looking back.
Adrian sat alone at the table. He poured two fingers of bourbon from the bottle the waiter had left and didn’t drink it. He sat with what Darius had said, “you took the most private thing I ever gave you”, and felt the weight of it nearly crush his soul.
He thought about twenty-five years and whether they could survive the last twelve months, and found that he genuinely didn’t know the answer. And found, underneath that, something worse: that the expression on Darius’s face in the last moment before he turned away was one Adrian had never seen there before and it changed everything he thought he understood about the last twenty-five years.
He didn’t touch the bourbon.
25 Years Earlier
Alpha Delta Phi didn’t announce itself. Founded at Hamilton College in 1832 and established at Harvard not long after, it was among the most selective literary societies in the country, not a fraternity in the conventional sense, but something that operated with the gravity of one. Membership came by invitation to a small number of men deemed worthy by the brothers already inside: accomplished, serious, the kind of men who would still be worth knowing in thirty years. The official pledge induction, the evening when selected Freshman received their bids and the brotherhood formally acknowledged them, was held each October in the society’s rooms on Massachusetts Avenue, a building that gave nothing away from the outside, which was entirely the point.
Adrian Mercer only had a vague awareness of this when he was rushed by the Society. Its significance had grown on him considerably and he was now honored, and more than a bit surprised, to be invited to pledge. Tonight was the ceremony.
Darius Whitfield had known considerably more. He was a Senior and beginning his fourth year in the society, and as the quarterback on the Harvard football team and a 4.0 student, not to mention African American, he was one of their most esteemed members. He had been watching Adrian Mercer for three weeks, throughout Rush. It had begun, as these things sometimes did, with a passing observation that refused to remain passing. What had stopped Darius was not Adrian’s face, though his face was notable, nor was it the way the morning light caught his floppy brown hair. It was how he moved. Economical. Precise. A body that had been trained to the highest level and deployed so effortlessly it no longer looked like training.
He had made a quiet inquiry. Two, in fact. What came back had confirmed his instincts and then exceeded them. State gymnastics champion, rings and parallel bars. Full ride to Harvard on grades, athletics, and financial need, the last detail telling Darius all he needed to know about the kind of character that had gotten Adrian here, the self-sufficiency of a young man who had built something from a foundation that offered very little to build on. Pre-med and economics. Nearly perfect scores. From a town in Indiana that Darius, who had grown up on Park Avenue and spent summers in the Hamptons, had never heard of and could not have located on a map.
Darius had observed Adrian several times before the pledge gathering, always without Adrian’s knowledge. Once in the dining hall, sitting alone with a book and eating with determined efficiency, but observing the room with an attentiveness that missed nothing. Once crossing the yard in a jacket that fit him in a way that Darius couldn’t ignore. Darius had noted the jacket. He was noticing most things about Adrian Mercer.
Darius had reached one inescapable conclusion, and it was an observation he’d experienced firsthand: Adrian was a young man who did not yet know who he was or who he might love. A boy who had grown up in a world that had no room for such things, but in his new environment carried something in him that Darius might bring to the surface. Darius had seen this before in other young men, and he understood what it required. He was twenty-two years old and had known himself completely since he was sixteen and that self-knowledge had given him clarity about the men who were still finding their way to the same understanding. He had submitted Adrian’s name to the pledge committee himself.
He had not mentioned this to anyone. He had gone to the induction ceremony, gotten there early and positioned himself where he would have the best line of sight to the door. He had been watching when Adrian Mercer walked in. As he observed Adrian’s mix of awe, curiosity, and a carefully guarded hunger for the other men in the room, Darius was certain: Adrian was exactly what he suspected he was.
He had noted other things too, the gymnast’s physique, visible even under street clothes, the coiled, unhurried grace of a body trained to do impossible things and make them look effortless. The pale skin, the perfect line of jaw and shoulder. Darius acknowledged to himself that Adrian’s unique beauty made it difficult to think about anything else. He was not confused about what he was feeling and he knew what he had to do about it.
Adrian accepted a beer he didn’t particularly want and positioned himself near the fireplace. He learned the names of two other pledges, one from Greenwich and one from Seoul, both of whom seemed considerably more at ease than he. He examined the portraits on the walls. He thought about the organic chemistry problem set due Friday and whether he’d left enough time for it.
It was in this state of careful, slightly distracted observation that he became aware he was being watched. Not the general sense of being assessed that had been present since he walked in. This was specific. Directed. The sustained attention from a single point.
Across the room, leaning against the far wall with a glass of bourbon was a relaxed figure that Adrian absorbed in rapid sequence: enormous, six feet four at least, the wide-shouldered, thick-legged build of an athlete at the peak of his physical development. African American, older, a Senior, almost certainly. The kind of handsome that was structural, architectural, built into the proportions of the face. And he was looking directly at Adrian with a steadiness that made no effort to be anything other than what it was.
Adrian looked away. Looked back. Neither the man, nor his gaze, had moved.
There was something in the stare that Adrian couldn’t categorize. It wasn’t hostile. It wasn’t the competitive appraisal he was used to from other athletes. It was something else, focused, deliberate, almost proprietary, as if the man knew something Adrian didn’t but would quickly learn. Adrian felt the back of his neck go warm in a way he didn’t have a ready explanation for. He was used to being assessed in gyms, in competition, in classrooms. This was different from all those things and he couldn’t have said precisely how.
At first, he assumed he was being hazed. It was the most available explanation: a Senior brother running some kind of psychological inventory on a pledge, testing whether he’d flinch. Adrian resolved not to. He looked back steadily, held the eye contact for three seconds, then turned away to resume his conversation with the pledge from Greenwich, who was saying something about crew.
But the warmth at the back of his neck didn’t go away.
As the opening remarks rambled on, Adrian’s mind wandered to the unlikely events that brought him to Harvard, to this room.
He had grown up in Millhaven, Indiana, population four thousand, two stoplights, one diner that doubled as the social center of the universe for anyone under twenty-five. His father ran a grain operation on four hundred acres of flat Midwestern land that Adrian had worked every summer since he was nine. His mother taught third grade. They were not poor, exactly, but the concept of being invited to any institution like the one he found himself in was so far outside his frame of reference that when his roommate explained it, Adrian had simply nodded and dismissed it as something that happened to other people.
He had gotten to Harvard on grades, gymnastics, and financial need, in that order. The grades had come naturally since he could read, a sharpness of mind that his teachers in Millhaven had described as exceptional and that Adrian himself had declined to think too hard about, because in Millhaven exceptional was not always a compliment. The gymnastics had taken the rest: twelve years of 5AM sessions in a gym forty minutes from the farm, two Indiana state championships on the rings and parallel bars, a body built by those years into something that his street clothes couldn’t conceal, the clean, striated musculature of an elite athlete, all of it visible in the set of his shoulders, his immense biceps, the line of his back, the way he moved through a room with the unconscious economy of someone who had spent years learning to control his body with precision.
He was oblivious to it, but he was, objectively, striking. He didn’t know this in the way that people who grow up knowing it know it. He simply set it aside as an exaggeration. A jawline that would, in fifteen years, make him look like something from a film about the Second World War. At eighteen he simply looked like what he was: a stunningly handsome Midwestern kid of unusual physical gifts and almost no self-consciousness about them, standing in the entry hall of one of the most exclusive institutions in the country and trying not to look as out of his depth as he felt.
He didn’t look across the room again. Even when he looked away, he could feel the presence of the man peering through him like a laser beam.
When he looked back, he found the man continuing to stare, unapologetically. The man held the eye contact, without adjusting, without the deflection that most men offered when they were caught looking. He was intentional. Adrian sensed he wanted him to feel it, not necessarily to understand it, but to feel it, know he was being assessed. To carry that warmth into the rest of the evening without being able to account for it.
The man waited for the formal program to conclude and then walked across the room in Adrian’s direction.
Adrian stood from his chair to leave the seating area and as he left his row, he felt him before he heard him.
“Adrian Mercer.”
Not a question. His name, stated, as though confirming something already established.
He turned. Up close, the man was even more physically present than he had appeared across the room, the sheer scale of him, the chest and shoulders that belonged to someone who had spent years building something formidable, the hands that held a bourbon glass with the casual ease of a man entirely comfortable in his own body. He was wearing a jacket that fit him like it was designed exclusively for his physique. His eyes were dark and entirely alert, and they were, Adrian noticed with a jolt of something he couldn’t name, the same eyes that had been watching him across the room for the past forty minutes.
“Darius Whitfield,” the man said. He extended his hand.
Adrian shook it. The grip was the grip of a quarterback, which Adrian, to his subsequent embarrassment, did not yet know was what Darius was. It was the grip of a man who knew the importance of a firm handshake.
“I know,” Darius began, which was not what Adrian had expected him to say. He continued: “Millhaven, Indiana. State champion on the rings and parallel bars, two consecutive years. Full ride, academics, gymnastics, and need, which is a combination I’ve never seen before in this building.” He said it without condescension, as a statement of fact, as if the unusual combination was the thing of interest rather than any judgment about the need portion of it. “You’re pre-med.”
“Pre-med and economics,” Adrian replied. He was aware, in a way he couldn’t entirely account for, that he was standing slightly straighter than he had been a moment ago.
Darius nodded slowly, as if this confirmed something. “That’s an unusual combination too.”
“I haven’t decided which one I’m actually doing,” Adrian said.
“Come outside,” Darius said. Not a question. Not an invitation, exactly. A direction, offered with enough warmth that it didn’t register as an order, even though it was.
Adrian went.
The side terrace was quieter than the main room, the October air sharp enough to make the warmth of the bourbon more apparent by contrast. Darius stood at the stone railing and looked out at the dark of the yard below like he owned it. Adrian stood beside him, close enough for conversation, and tried to appear as though he stood on the terraces of exclusive Harvard clubs with self-assured Seniors regularly.
“You don’t know who I am,” Darius said. It wasn’t an accusation.
“Should I?”
“Most people here do.” He said it without vanity, as a data point. “I’m the quarterback.”
Adrian processed this. The Harvard quarterback. He remembered, with an internal wince, that he had in fact seen coverage of the Harvard-Yale game the previous fall without retaining the name of the man throwing the ball, and that the man throwing the ball was now standing next to him on a terrace informing him of this as though it were a minor administrative detail.
“I’m from Indiana,” Adrian said, by way of partial explanation. “We have a different football situation.”
Darius laughed. It was a real laugh, unguarded, and it was the first entirely uncontrolled thing Adrian had seen from him.
“Fair enough,” Darius said. He turned to face Adrian more directly, resting one arm on the railing, which brought him closer and simultaneously made him seem less like a fixed architectural feature of the evening. “Here’s what I want to tell you. I’ve been watching you since you walked in tonight.”
Adrian said nothing. He’d been aware of this for the better part of an hour.
“Harvard is not a difficult place if you already know how it works,” Darius said. “If you grew up going to schools that prepared you for it, if you have family who’ve been here, if the whole apparatus of this institution is something you absorbed before you arrived. For people like that, the difficulty is academic. The rest of it is just…familiar.” He paused. “For people who didn’t grow up that way, the difficulty is something else. It’s navigational. And most people who face that difficulty either retreat into the parts of the institution that feel safe, or try to imitate the people who seem comfortable, neither of which actually works.”
He looked at Adrian steadily.
“You’re not doing either of those things. You’ve been standing in that room for an hour being completely yourself, which nobody taught you to do here and which is, in my experience, considerably rarer than it looks.”
Although these accolades were offered by a near stranger, Adrian was disarmed by being accurately described by someone who had no reason to have noticed. He was nineteen years old and had spent most of his life in a town where standing out was something you managed rather than cultivated, and the experience of someone looking at him and acknowledging the very thing he was trying not to perform.
“I’m taking you under my wing,” Darius said. He said it simply, the way he said everything, as a settled matter, a conclusion already reached. “I’m not explaining why right now. You’ll understand eventually.” He straightened, which at six feet four had a particular effect on the immediate atmosphere. “What I’m telling you is that there are things about this place you need to know and people you need to know and ways of moving through it that aren’t written down anywhere. I know all of them. And I’m going to make sure you do too. We start this week.” He named a day and a time. Thursday, seven o’clock, a restaurant in Cambridge that Adrian had walked past and assumed was not intended for him. “Dinner,” Darius said. “I’ll see you there.”
Then, before Adrian could respond, he added: “Wear the jacket. The navy one you had on Tuesday.”
Adrian stared at him. “How do you know what jacket I was wearing on Tuesday?”
Darius’s expression contained something that was not quite a smile. “Thursday,” he said. “Seven o’clock,” and walked back inside.
Adrian stood on the terrace for a moment after he left, the October air on his face, the noise of the room filtering out through the door. He was aware of several things simultaneously: that he had just been told to come to dinner the way you tell a junior colleague to attend a meeting, with no question as to whether he would be available; that this had not bothered him in the slightest; that a man he had known for fifteen minutes had accurately described something about him he was only finding out himself; and that he had noticed, was actually still noticing, the warmth that Darius’s sustained attention had produced. But what was more profound was that that warmth had no precedent. He’d never before experienced the feeling he was feeling now. He sensed a genuine affection from a man who had no reason to offer it for a reason which was entirely unclear heading for a future which was unknown.
He went back inside. He finished his beer. He talked to the pledge from Greenwich about crew for another twenty minutes without retaining a word of it.
When the evening ended and people began to leave, Darius found him one more time near the door. He said goodnight with a handshake that became, briefly, something else, his left hand clutched Adrian’s shoulder, a grip that lasted three seconds longer than a handshake required, close enough that Adrian was aware of the sheer physical scale of him in a way that was both entirely matter-of-fact and not matter-of-fact at all.
“Thursday,” Darius said again, and left.
Adrian walked home to his dormitory in the October dark. Thankfully, his roommate was gone. He sat on the edge of his bed for a moment and took stock of the evening with a mix of bewilderment and exhilaration.
He undressed. He lay back on the bed. The room was quiet.
His mind, which was generally cooperative with the directions he gave it, declined to cooperate. He had a technique, when he wanted to sleep, of working through a problem set, something concrete and structured to occupy the analytical portion and let the rest of him power down. He tried the organic chemistry problem. His mind moved through two steps of it and then arrived, without his participation, back at the terrace. Darius’s proximity. His authority. The hand on his shoulder that had lasted three seconds too long.
Before long, he recognized he was erect.
This was not, in itself, a novel situation. He was nineteen. But what raced through his mind, the dark eyes and the ambiguous smile and the low certain voice saying Thursday, seven o’clock as though Adrian’s attendance were not a question, was disquieting. He had slept with two girls in high school, once in the back of a truck on a summer night and once more in a basement while her parents were away, and both times had been enthusiastic and willing but had left him with the vague sense that something was missing. Not technique. Not connection. Something more fundamental that he had attributed, at the time, to inexperience, and had not looked at too closely since.
He lay in the dark and let his mind go where it was going, which was reluctantly going to Darius Whitfield on the terrace, and then, when that image wasn’t sufficient, to what Darius Whitfield might look like in the football locker room, the shoulder pads, the jersey, and eventually the jock strap. His hand moved and the room was quiet and the October dark held everything in it, and he found, at the end of it, that the image still in his mind was not the old girlfriend, but a set of dark eyes that had watched him across a room all evening and found, in what they saw, something worth taking under their wing. Darius was peering at him from the locker room just as he had on the terrace, fondling his sweat stained jockstrap, looking at Adrian longingly.
His hand moved faster and he attributed it more to the pure muscle memory than the images that he couldn’t seem to shake. But the more he fought to avoid those thoughts, the more pronounced and exaggerated they became and the faster his hand worked. It became a vicious cycle which continued until it could no longer. Adrian came with an intensity that not only surprised him but actually concerned him. Why tonight? What was different? Why did Darius keep intruding on his masturbation fantasies? The shoulder pads? The jock strap? The intensity of his stare? Where did it all come from?
He lay still for a moment afterward. He reached for the towel by his bed. The practical, methodical habits of a farm kid.
He chalked it up to the strangeness of the evening, to being nineteen, to being far from home in an institution that still felt like someone else’s country. A one-time thing. He was almost certain it was a one-time thing. That was the explanation he chose, and it was, the kind of explanation that worked best if you didn’t examine it too closely.
Across Cambridge, in the Ware Street townhouse, Darius Whitfield sat in the dark of his sitting room with a bourbon he had poured an hour ago and not touched. The pledge gathering had ended over an hour ago. He had been sitting here since he got home, which was not a thing he typically did, Darius was not a man who sat in the dark turning things over. He was a man who decided and acted and moved forward, fully confident, never doubting his own judgment.
He was doubting it now. Not the assessment, the assessment was correct, he was certain of that. Adrian Mercer was exactly what he’d believed, and the pledge gathering had confirmed it completely. What he was doubting was something else. Something less familiar.
He had watched a lot of men from across a lot of rooms. He had identified potential and cultivated it and taken satisfaction in what it became. He had never, in the course of any of that, sat in the dark contemplating a man whose eyes projected equal parts warmth and hunger.
He picked up the bourbon. He set it down.
This required care. Adrian was nineteen years old, in his first semester, with no framework for what Darius intended to show him. The sequence mattered. The patience mattered. He would need to move slowly, and he would need to keep certain things, the things he was feeling right now, in this chair, in this dark, entirely to himself.
He was good at that. He had been good at that his entire adult life.
He picked up the bourbon and drank it. He went to bed. He did not sleep for some time.
-To be continued-
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