Clothes Left at the Door
Darius Whitfield graduated from Harvard on a Saturday in May, 4.0, Summa Cum Laude, Alpha Delta Phi President, and Harvard football MVP. His parents flew up from New York, his father in a suit that made the other fathers look like they were dressed for a different occasion. His grandmother came from Harlem. The photographs from that afternoon showed a self-assuredness most people just dream of: composed, present, slightly larger than the space required.
Adrian was there. He wasn’t given a role or even introduced, so he stood at the edge of the crowd on the common and watched Darius cross the stage and felt something he couldn’t name tighten in his chest. He applauded with everyone else. He told himself it was pride, which was true. He told himself it was only pride, which was not.
Darius found him afterward in the crowd, put both hands on his shoulders and looked at him with deep affection and said: “You’re going to be fine here.” Words that Adrian wasn’t quite sure how to interpret. Then Darius’s mother appeared, Darius made a gratuitous introduction, and the afternoon moved forward into the organized warmth of a family reunion, and Adrian stood at its edge and watched the man who had changed everything about his life disappear into the life he was going back to.
He took a bus to Logan Airport that afternoon. He had a return ticket to Indianapolis, a summer on the farm, and three more years of Harvard ahead of him. He had, he thought on the drive, a great deal to be grateful for.
He had never been less comforted by gratitude in his life.
***
Adrian changed his major the following fall. Economics out, business in, with a concentration in retail management, which his advisor discouraged, and that Adrian described as the only thing he had encountered at Harvard that felt like a direction rather than a credential. When he called Marcus to tell him. Marcus said, unsurprised, that he’d been waiting for the call.
That same fall, Darius began his MBA at NYU, living in the Manhattan apartment, and found himself, now, briefly, a student again. He was characteristically philosophical about it.
Darius called every few weeks through that fall. Adrian called back within the hour every time and spent the intervening minutes telling himself this was normal, that it was simply the maintenance of a mentorship that had mattered to both of them, not what it really felt like. They’d talk for about ninety minutes. Adrian sat on his dormitory bed with his back against the wall warmed by the voice that could make a dorm room in Cambridge feel like the apartment on the Upper West Side and tried not to think about the fact that the distance between them was now permanent.
He was, by the spring of his sophomore year, in love with Darius Whitfield. It didn’t announce itself. It didn’t ask permission. And it didn’t ask whether it was reciprocal. Or practical. Or wise. He remembered what Marcus had told him on a Manhattan sidewalk the previous spring: Darius was not interested in a committed relationship with a man. He had made his decision about his life and he did not intend to revisit it. Adrian boxed this up and tried to keep the lid on.
The following summer he returned to Manhattan and worked at Strand, would see Darius occasionally and tried, with considerable discipline, to be in love with a man from a comfortable distance. He was only moderately successful.
***
He tripled his workload when he changed his major and graduated from Harvard with honors and a business degree after only three years. He had a clarity of direction that his classmates, most of whom were heading to consulting firms or investment banks, hadn’t yet figured out, or found either enviable or alarming depending on their temperament. He had arranged, through Marcus, an entry-level position at a mid-size men’s retailer in Boston that was doing interesting things with vertical integration and private label manufacturing. He lasted fourteen months.
Not because the job was bad. Because he could see, by month eight, exactly what the company could be and exactly why it was not going to become that under its current management. He had identified the problem and had run out of interest in watching other people decline to solve it.
He went back to Marcus. He told him what he’d seen. Marcus listened attentively, convinced that his initial assessment of Adrian’s talent was on point. His response: “You don’t want to work for someone else. You’ve never wanted to work for someone else. Stop pretending otherwise and tell me what you actually want to build.”
Adrian told him.
What he described, over three hours at a table in the back of Strand on a Tuesday afternoon in November, was not precisely a store and not precisely a brand and not precisely a wholesale operation but something that operated at the intersection of all three: a men’s fashion house that controlled the full supply chain from design through retail, built around the philosophy that most men’s clothing failed its customer by treating him as an afterthought rather than a primary consideration. Not fashion-forward in the runway sense. Considered. Intentional. The kind of clothes a man put on in the morning and felt, in some way he couldn’t fully articulate.
Marcus funded the first round, directly, without theatre, with a term sheet that was fair and a phone call that lasted four minutes. “You have two years to prove the concept,” he said. “Don’t waste them.”
Adrian moved to Dallas which was where the manufacturing relationships and the early wholesale accounts and the geography of what he was building intersected. He opened the first Hawthorne Row store on Henderson Avenue in the fall, in a converted warehouse space that Marcus helped him negotiate and that looked, on opening day, exactly like what it was: the beginning of something serious.
The fashion press found it within six months. Not the runway press, Hawthorne Row was never going to be a runway brand, and Adrian knew it and didn’t particularly care, but the retail press, the business press, the corner of the menswear world that paid attention to concepts rather than logos. GQ came first, then a profile in the Dallas Morning News that got picked up nationally, then a partnership inquiry from a department store group that Adrian declined on terms that made Marcus shake his head and say “Good”.
He was, by his early thirties, running one of the more consistently reviewed men’s fashion concepts in the country. He was also, by every measure that applied, entirely and uncomplicatedly gay, a fact he had never announced and never concealed and that the industry absorbed with a shrug. Fashion was, as Darius had once pointed out, very accepting.
***
Darius’s trajectory was different in its setting but identical in its determination.
He completed his NYU MBA in two years and joined Forrester Brothers as a financial analyst, which was not the role his pedigree would have suggested and was entirely the role he had chosen, because Darius had decided at twenty-four that the way to run a company was to understand it from inside rather than arrive at its top from outside, and that the patience required for this approach was simply patience, which he had. His colleagues at Forrester found him, in those early years, impressive and slightly difficult to read, which was, as Adrian could have told them, simply how Darius operated in rooms where he had not yet decided what to show.
He moved up. Not quickly in the way of men who are promoted because they are liked, but steadily in the way of men who are promoted because the alternative is to watch them leave. Director of Financial Planning by twenty-eight. VP of Strategy at thirty-two. CFO at thirty-seven, which made him the youngest in the company’s history and the second-ever black executive in the C-Suite, a fact that Darius acknowledged in the press release and declined to discuss at length afterward, not because it didn’t matter but because he understood that the most durable form of that statement was performance rather than commentary.
He lived in Atlanta, where Forrester Brothers had its headquarters, in an apartment in Buckhead that was larger than he needed and furnished with the same restraint as the Cambridge townhouse and the Manhattan apartment, an aesthetic that said that this was a man who knew exactly what he liked and had stopped acquiring things that fell short of it. He was in his late thirties, professionally established, personally private, and single in the way that read more as a statement than an absence.
It was largely assumed in Atlanta’s professional community that Darius Whitfield was gay. Not gossiped about, exactly, he was too formidable for that, and there was nothing in his conduct to confirm it, but assumed, the way you assume things about a man in his late thirties who has never been seen with a woman and who deflects personal questions with the ease of someone who has been deflecting them for twenty years. He had never confirmed it. He had never denied it. He had never, as far as anyone could tell, felt compelled to address it at all.
In gay business circles, particularly in the overlap between Adrian’s and Darius’s industries, what was known was more specific. Darius and Adrian occassionally found themselves at conferences and industry events in cities like New York and Chicago and London where the gay subculture acknowledged them as fuck buddies. The term was not romantic and not entirely accurate, but neither of them disputed it because disputing it would have required them talking about what it was, and that conversation had still never happened.
***
They saw each other four or five times a year. A conference in New York where they ended up at the same dinner and found their way, by the end of the evening, to whichever hotel room was closer. A weekend when Darius was in Dallas for a board meeting and called Adrian the afternoon he arrived, and Adrian answered before the second ring affecting surprise that he hadn't been waiting for the call. A trip to London where they spent three days pretending to have separate agendas and then gave up the fiction on the second night with the mutual relief of two people who have been pretending for too long.
The sex was, and had always been, extraordinary. This was a fact they carefully avoided discussing, because discussing it would have required acknowledging that extraordinary sex between two people who had known each other for twenty years and continued to seek each other out across careers and cities could reasonably be interpreted by either or both as something far more than fuck buddies.
Adrian knew exactly what it was. He had known since they parted when Darius graduated from Harvard. He carried it because he had no alternative. Not loving Darius wasn’t something he could choose. It chose him. No drama. No complaint, but with the constant low awareness of the reality.
Adrian more than earned his reputation for showing other young male executives in the retail industry the way of the world. He successfully “mentored” many of them in the same way Darius had “mentored” him. After about a decade in retail, openly gay and an established force in the industry, he hosted an annual party in his hotel suite the last night of MAGIC Las Vegas that became legendary. MAGIC Las Vegas was the largest go-to market event in the fashion industry, held twice a year at the Las Vegas Convention Center. It covered menswear specifically and every major retailer and male fashion designer attended. He reserved a multi-bedroom suite the last night of the conference and, given Adrian’s status as founder and CEO of Hawthorne Row, referred to it as “The After Party” rather than what it was, an orgy. He opened the doors at 11 and it frequently lasted until dawn.
The invitation list was exclusive. Only the fittest, most successful men in the industry were invited, some openly gay, some not. But, in the spirit of Las Vegas, there was an unspoken agreement that what happened at The After-Party stayed at The After-Party. By Thursday night, they’d all endured a long week and, like most driven executives, stayed focused on their work. This was the perfect way to let off steam.
The lights were dim when they’d arrive. Alcohol and weed were plentiful, and other unnamed party drugs may or may not been ingested beforehand. The rules were mandatory: Clothes left at the door. Bottoms wore jockstraps leaving them exposed where it mattered. Tops wore chaps or other types of undergear showcasing their hardware. Adrian supplied a wide assortment of each for anyone who failed to come prepared. Waitstaff, wearing nothing but leather jockstraps and bow ties, were sourced from the local Chippendales revue. You could smell the testosterone and anticipation when you crossed the threshold.
Adrian had invited Darius every previous year and the sixth year of the party he finally accepted claiming he had unrelated business in Las Vegas that week. Adrian wondered whether the “unrelated business” was a ruse to finally attend, but he didn’t care. This was the year Darius would finally attend.
Adrian had alerted the greeter to watch for Darius and explain the rules just as he would other first-timers. He was to simply hand Darius the jockstrap when he arrived, no questions asked. He was also to explain the rules to Darius in case he wasn’t aware of them and add that the host, Adrian, insisted there be no exceptions.
The room filled quickly and by 11:30 the air already carried the first hints of sweat, poppers, and cum. At least a dozen half-nude men filled the beautiful suite, many in the early stages of open exploration. Some on their knees, some on their backs, some on their stomachs, and some still vertical. Adrian kept a discreet lookout for Adrian and finally his massive black frame appeared in the door. Like every other time Adrain would see Darius after being apart, his heart leapt into his throat. He hoped for the day Darius didn’t undo him like that, but it continued to even after all these years. Once Adrian’s breathing was back under control, he watched, amused, as the greeter, wearing nothing but a jockstrap and bow tie, offered Darius the jock Adrian had picked out specially for him and pointed him to the room to shed his clothes. Wondering if he was actually being required to strip down to only a jock, he scanned the room looking for Adrian and, seconds later, found him. Their eyes met and Darius held up the jock and mouthed the words, “Seriously?”
Adrian, in no mood for negotiation, nodded assertively and pointed him to the room to change.
For Darius’s part, although the room was already throbbing with testosterone and sex, Adrian was hard to miss; the most handsome man in the room, still boyish, still looking like he was carved out of marble. Neither wanted to be the first to break eye contact, but Darius lost the duel. He couldn’t pretend not to see Adrian’s semi-hard cock swinging freely between his chap-clad legs.
Darius disappeared into the small changing room and his emergence nearly stopped the party. Mid-thirties now, but still with the musculature of his college quarterback youth. 6’4”, black, glowing skin with every muscle pumped like he just walked out of the gym. His shoulders still round and solid, his V-shaped torso unapologetically directing one’s eye to the massive bulge in the lace-up white jockstrap Adrian had assigned. The room quieted as he emerged and walked defiantly toward Adrian, took the bourbon from his hand and said, “Good, you brought the Blanton’s,” and took a sip.
Scanning Darius from head to toe, lingering on his mid-section, Adrian replied, “You’re looking sexier than ever.”
“Happy to oblige. After hearing the stories of this party, I didn’t want to disappoint.”
“You never disappoint”, Adrian smiled and gave him a warm hug and a kiss.
The party around them continued to heat up, surrounding them with everything under the sun. Some couples stood and talked, some passed joints, some were on their knees devouring their partner’s erection. Off in a corner, a couple blatantly fucked over the side of the couch. And that was just in the living area. Audible moans and groans came from the every corner of the living room and the assorted bedrooms that surrounded it.
Adrian pulled Darius to a small couch off to the side. Once seated, he pulled Darius’s arm around him and snuggled into his side. “You know how much I miss you?” he said as he looked up into his eyes.
“Always”, Darius responded.
They sat for awhile, surrounded with the sounds and smell of an orgy. Gasps, cries, grunts. Poppers, sweat, cum.
They sat there quietly for a few moments, taking it all in. Darius, pulled Adrian into him even closer and asked, “You really do this every year?”
“This is my sixth. It’s become legendary. The hottest invitation of the week.”
Darius looked around the room and answered, “I can see why.”
“It took you long enough to show up”, Adrian said, with a slightly bitter tone.
“I’m here now”, he smiled and gently took Adrian’s semi-hard cock in his hand. He looked into Adrian’s eyes and said, “You know what I want.”
“I always know what you want” he replied, again with a tone of barely concealed frustration.
Between their genuine affection for each other and the combustible debauchery, they could wait no longer. Adrian stood up and pulled Darius up with him. “C’mon, I saved the best room for us.”
Adrian led him by the hand to the room, opened the door revealing a beautiful king size bed in front of floor-to-ceiling windows framing the Las Vegas Strip skyline.
“On your stomach, big guy. I’ve haven’t tasted that beautiful hole of yours in far too long.”
Climbing on the bed, face down, Darius responded, “It’s all yours. I’ve saved it for you.”
Imagining there was a genuine affection implied by Darius’s comment, Adrian dived in like a starving man. He pulled Darius’s cheeks apart ferociously, hungrily attacking his hole with his tongue.
“Somebody’s hungry”, Darius laughed between moans.
“I’m always hungry for you”, Adrian replied, wishing Darius would get it through his thick skull how much he meant to him. “Shut up and open up for me”, he added.
“You’re insatiable,” Darius replied, noticing Adrian was more predatory than usual.
Coming up for air, he countered, slightly irritated, “I’m taking what I’m owed.”
Darius chose not to respond, he knew full well what Adrian was implying, and, like always, he wouldn’t allow himself to go there.
Something overcame Adrian. Between the release of the end of the week, the booze and weed, the debauchery of the evening, Darius's chronic withholding touched a nerve. He was in love with Darius and he knew, on some level, Darius loved him as much as he loved Darius. But he wouldn’t relent.
He pulled his face away from Darius’s ass, and said, with an uncharacteristically aggressive tone, “Open up, I’m gonna fuck you like I’ve never fucked you before,” and spit in his hole. Adrian felt the gob of spit hit its bullseye, immediately followed by Adrian’s steel like cock enter forcibly and penetrate fully. No grace. No apology. Near assault.
“WHAT THE FUCK?!” Darius yelped.
“FUCK!!!” Adrian yelled back. He was torn between lust and anger. He was near wits end. He had let his emotion and animal lust get the better of him, and he wasn’t entirely sorry. Darius had played him long enough.
But he quickly came to his senses. He knew that if he continued the onslaught, he could lose Darius forever. He quickly calculated he’d rather have Darius on a part-time basis than not at all.
Still fully penetrated, he carefully lowered his body down on top of Darius, embraced him from behind and whispered in his ear, “I’m sorry, Darius. I don’t know what got into me. Between the party outside and seeing you again…I guess I lost control a bit. Forgive me?”
Darius groaned softly and whispered back, “Just don’t move for a minute. I’ll survive. Then you can fuck me, nice and slow, like you have so many times before.”
Adrian wanted to say “I love you” so badly it literally hurt his heart. With the full weight of him pressing down on Darius, he simply whispered into his ear, “Just say when you’re good to go.”
Before long, Adrian could feel Darius begin to arch his back pushing his ass into Adrian’s cock, signaling he was ready to resume.
What ensued may have been the most romantic fuck of their relationship. Every time Adrian slid into Darius he chanted the words silently to himself, “I love you”. He knew Darius wasn’t offering his love in return, but he had the next best thing. They were connected in the most personal, intimate way two men can be, and Adrian had made his peace with that. He had learned to live with the fact that he was Darius’s “go to” man. He squeezed Darius so hard from behind Darius had to ask him to loosen his grip or he’d suffocate.
It wasn’t lost on Darius that Adrian’s emotions nearly got the best of him. He gently rolled Darius onto his back, crawled between his legs, and peered into his eyes. Adrain reentered him more slowly and lovingly than ever before and it may have been the most emotional moment between the two of them. Adrian couldn't tell which was more overwhelming — the pleasure surging through his body or the love filling his chest, both equally consuming. Darius felt the same way. The pressure on his prostate built with every stroke, but it was the eyes staring back at him, belonging to the one man he loved and would never admit it to, that pushed him past anything he could control.
All Adrian wanted to hear was Darius say “I love you”.
All Darius feared was to hear Adrian say “I love you”.
It continued, both living with their disappointment, fears, but appreciating the exquisiteness of their physical intimacy. Both had had ample other sexual experiences, but nothing came close to each other.
After it was over, like so many times before that night, they laid on their backs, Darius holding Adrian, and talked about everything except their feelings.
Adrain continued to ponder the lifelong question: was Darius’s withholding ignorance or choice? He had seen, in certain moments, the way Darius held the eye contact longer than the situation required, the nature of his attention in the hours after sex when his guard was at its lowest, the expression on his face at LaGuardia two years ago when Adrian said he had to get to his gate and Darius had stood on the curb and said nothing, just looked like he wanted to say, “Don’t go”, but for some reason couldn’t. He had chosen not to press them. He had the warning from Marcus, twenty years old and still operative, and he had the decision Darius had made about his life and had not revisited, and he had the understanding, hard won and honestly held, that you cannot love a man into a life he has decided not to live.
So he loved him from the distance that was available. He saw him when Darius called. He went to bed afterward feeling an uneasy combination of satisfaction and grief that had become, over the years, as familiar as his own name. He built his company. He won his awards. He was, by any external measure, a successful and fortunate man.
They were both, in the quiet of their own accounting, two men who had been in love with each other for over a decade and had never once said so.
* * *
The call came on a Tuesday afternoon in October. Adrian’s assistant flagged it as Darius calling from his Forrester Brothers landline, which was unusual, Darius typically called from his cell, and the formality of the office line meant something.
“I’ll take it,” Adrian said, and went to his office and closed the door.
“Darius.”
“Adrian.” The voice was the same voice it had always been, low, certain, present. Twenty-five years and it still produced the same effect it had always produced, which made Adrian’s heart pound. “I’m calling professionally. I have an idea that’s half opportunity and half favor”.
Adrian leaned back in his chair. “All right.”
“I’ve been CEO at Forrester for three years, long enough to know what the company needs and to have been wrong about a few things.” A pause that signaled an interesting conversation was about to take place. “I have a board vacancy that needs filling. I want someone who understands both the retail piece and the brand piece, someone who can look at our consumer-facing operations and tell me honestly what’s wrong with them and why we haven’t fixed it.” The next pause was shorter. “I want you on my Board, Adrian.”
Adrian was quiet for a moment. Not because he was uncertain, he had known his answer within approximately four seconds of the sentence starting, but because he understood the weight of what he was about to agree to and felt, in the interest of honesty with himself, that it deserved at least a moment’s acknowledgment.
The professional case was real. He knew Forrester Brothers’ retail operations well enough to have opinions about them that he had kept to himself at industry dinners for years. The Board seat was significant. The work would be interesting.
These were not the primary reasons he was going to say yes.
There was another reason: Jake Sullivan. Darius had recruited Jake as Chief Marketing Officer roughly two years earlier, Adrian had noted it at the time as Jake was a rising star in retail. Adrian had heard his name three times in the last year from three different sources, each time with the same impression: this one is something. A passing reference from a mutual contact described him as the most talented CMO in the mid-market segment and possibly the most unaware of it. Adrian recognized the description because it was the same description, gifted, unrealized, waiting for someone to show him the door, that Darius had applied to Adrian himself twenty-five years ago. He had, at the time, set it aside.
He found he wasn’t setting it aside this time.
Darius went on to tell him the Board seat would have an important additional component: To mentor Jake. Darius considered Jake as a worthy candidate for his successor when the time came but needed considerable seasoning and broadening beyond marketing. He needed the breadth of experience, gravitas, and board-readiness that only Adrian could provide.
Adrian didn’t know, sitting in his Dallas office with Darius’s voice on the line, that what he was considering was the beginning of a sequence that would, over the next twelve months, upend the professional and personal trajectory of four people’s lives, including his own. He didn’t know that the same mentor’s instinct that had made him extraordinary at the work, the ability to see what someone was before they could see it themselves, to position himself at the precise moment of readiness and offer the door, was about to operate in a context that would make Adrian’s and Daruis’s twenty-five-year accumulation of restraint entirely and utterly unsustainable.
He didn’t know any of this.
What he knew was that Darius was on the phone, asking him to come closer. And that he had never, in twenty-five years, said no to that.
“Yes,” Adrian said. “I’m in.”
He could hear, in the pause that followed, Darius exhale with gratitude. “Good,” Darius said. “I’ll have my assistant send the details.”
“I’ll wait for the call,” Adrian replied as if the request had been routine and inconsequential. It was anything but.
Adrian looked out the window at Henderson Avenue, at the late October light on the street he had built his life on. He thought about twenty-five years and what they contained. He thought about what he was about to walk back into.
The line went quiet. Adrian sat with the phone in his hand for a moment in the October afternoon, with the samples on the table in the next room and the company he had built around him and, once again, felt the weight of their relationship.
He set the phone down.
He had learned, a long time ago, how to hold what he felt and keep working. He was very good at it.
He was about to find out what it cost.
-To be continued-
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