Te Quiero, Cabrón
The alarm went off at 5:45 and Adrian's arm was already lifting from around Jake's shoulders before the second buzz. Jake was awake. He'd been awake for some time, lying in the dark listening to Adrian breathe, doing what he'd told himself he wouldn't do, which was to think.
He resisted the strong desire to curl into Adrian's naked body. Instead, he reluctantly pushed himself away and dressed quietly. His clothes from the night before were folded on the chair, which he had not done meaning Adrian had done it while Jake was asleep, a small and unremarkable thing, yet it was the thing that undid him most. He sat on the edge of the chair and put on his shoes and looked at Adrian, trying to figure out what the hell he was feeling.
"Safe flight," Adrian said, without opening his eyes.
"Thank you," he said, intending it for the bourbon and the pot and the view and the alarm. He presumed Adrian knew that, so didn't say anything else. He let himself out quietly and walked down the hall to his own room for three minutes looking at the untouched bed before he finished packing and called a car.
He was on the plane by seven-fifteen. Somewhere over Tennessee, his phone buzzed.
Adrian:
You ok?
Jake stared at the two words for longer than two words required.
Jake:
I think so. This is a lot.
Adrian:
I know. I'm here for you.
Jake:
Thank you.
Adrian:
Anything you need. I'll find a way.
Jake looked at that for a moment. He sent a thumbs-up and put the phone face-down on the tray table and looked out the window at the clouds and thought about nothing for a long time.
* * *
Monday morning, Jake’s staff meeting, 8AM. He sat at the head of the table in the Forrester conference room where he'd been running this meeting for nearly two years, his team arrayed around him, five direct reports, all of them competent, most of them genuinely good, Cole the runaway star of the team, and listened to them talk about what they’d heard about the Board meeting.
By all measures, the meeting had been a success. Everyone knew it. Jake had crushed it. That was the word being used. Adrian Mercer had been visibly impressed, Darius was pleased, and the Board was talking. Everyone at this table knew their boss had knocked it out of the park.
Jake nodded, humbly accepted their praise, and moved through the agenda. He knew how to run this meeting in his sleep. Cole, seated two chairs to his left where he always sat, said nothing and watched him. So proud of his friend, but unable to express it adequately.
Jake sensed him watching.
He got through the meeting. He thanked his team. He went back to his office and closed the door, which he almost never did, and sat at his desk and stared at his laptop without opening it.
He was 35 years old and the CMO of a Fortune 500 company. He had a career he'd built from nothing, a body he'd disciplined into something he was proud of, and a model of himself he’d built to carry him through his entire adult life.
The model was broken.
Not cracked. Not stressed. Broken. He'd walked into a hotel room in Nashville three days ago and came out the other side completely changed. The man who'd knocked on that door of Room 714 at 9 on Thursday night, and the man sitting at this desk were not the same person and he had no idea what to do about that.
— Nashville —
He'd felt it coming. That was the part he couldn't stop returning to, not the kiss itself but the moment before it, the way he'd turned to meet Adrian's gaze on the balcony and known, with perfect clarity, exactly what was about to happen. He knew. And had stayed anyway.
Adrian's mouth had been soft. That was the thing Jake hadn't prepared for. He didn’t know what he expected, but he didn’t expect it to be soft. He'd been braced for something he'd need to endure or analyze or survive. What it was instead was simply warm, and patient, and entirely without apology. He had cautiously, yet willingly, leaned into it.
When their lips met for the first time, Jake thought he’d melt. He’d never experienced the desire to “melt” before, but that was the only thing he could conjure up. He wanted Adrain to put his arms around him, hold him, and protect him. He’d never asked or expected that from anyone before.
When Adrian pulled back and asked if it was all right, Jake kissed him back and asked, "Got your answer?” As a result, something had appeared on Adrian's face that Jake suspected very few people ever got to see. Adrian smiled, unguarded, and Jake had felt the very real pride of having produced it, which was different from every other form of Adrian's approval he'd been accumulating for three days, except that it was better. He'd known it in his body before he'd known it in his mind.
***
He opened the laptop. He closed it again.
He thought about the women. Not any one of them specifically, there had been enough that no single face came forward, but the pattern of them, the rotating cast of striking, accomplished women he'd moved through his adult life with, each relationship ending the same way: gradually, without drama, him never quite able to explain why he'd pulled back. He'd always attributed it to ambition, to the demands of the career, to not being ready. His friends had called it a fear of commitment, and he'd accepted the label because it was easier than the alternative.
The alternative was now sitting in his chest like a stone.
He had liked those women. Some of them he'd genuinely cared for. But he understood now, with a clarity that was profoundly simple, that something had always been absent, something he'd been waiting to feel that none of them had produced. He hadn't been withholding himself from those relationships out of ambition or fear. He'd been waiting for something he hadn't had the vocabulary to name.
He had the vocabulary now.
He had a closed office door and a laptop he couldn't bring himself to open.
***
The week following the Board meeting Cole noticed things and noted them without initially knowing what they added up to.
Monday: Jake closed his office door. In eighteen months, Cole could count on one hand the number of times Jake had done that during working hours. When it opened, Jake was on his phone, looking at it, not talking into it. He put it in his pocket when he saw Cole in the hall and said something normal and walked past.
Tuesday: Jake missed the morning workout. No response to Cole's text until 9.
Jake:
Skipping today. Just not feeling it.
Cole read it three times. Jake Sullivan “not feeling it” was an event he had no prior example of.
Also Tuesday: a strategy session where Jake deferred to Marcus on two points he disagreed with, Cole could see it on his face, and looked at his phone several times, which Jake never did in meetings. Jake strongly discouraged anyone checking their phone during meetings.
Wednesday: Cole walked past Jake's office at 6:15 and saw him still at his desk, jacket off, the stillness of a man who wasn't working but hadn't decided to go home yet.
Thursday: Cole asked him to grab a beer. Jake declined. Said he had calls. Cole had seen the calendar, no calls on there.
Friday: Same offer, same decline. But this time Jake looked like he wanted to say yes and was stopping himself.
Cole had a theory. He didn't like it.
He'd known about Adrian Mercer's reputation before the Board announcement, known it through the informal network that existed below the surface of every industry. Adrian was brilliant. He was also, by multiple accounts Cole trusted, a man who had a type. And the type was exactly what Jake Sullivan was. Cole had been watching Jake's energy around Adrian's name for two weeks before Nashville.
He was keeping an eye on it now. He didn't like what he was seeing. At all.
Cole’s feeling underneath that was more complicated. He'd had his own version of it since almost the first month of knowing Jake, a slow-burn ache he kept at distance because Jake was his boss and, as far as anyone could tell, straight. He’d already learned that wanting things you couldn't have never ended well. So he put it in that compartment of “If only...” and gotten on with his life. But at the end of the day, he was genuinely glad Jake was in it at all.
But if something had happened in Nashville, if Adrian had pushed Jake somewhere Jake hadn't chosen to go, Cole had feelings about that. They were not mild.
— Nashville —
Jake had dropped to his knees without deciding to, which was the pattern of the night, his body moving before his mind caught up. Adrian had sat back on the balcony couch with the patience of a man who had all the time in the world and let Jake taste his first cock.
At first Jake had just stared. He'd had a moment, almost comedic from the outside he imagined, of the sheer improbability of seeing himself in this position, Jake Sullivan on his knees on a Nashville hotel balcony doing something that a month ago would have been inconceivable. And like his first kiss, he was once again surprised. Yes, Adrian’s cock was as hard as a steel rod, no surprise there, but at the same time it was soft and warm and pliable. Strangely, even comforting. He explored the difference between the hard shaft and the swollen head with his tongue. Jake had never remotely considered sucking a man’s cock and now he was on his knees, savoring it, wondering why this took so long. He wanted nothing more but to stay there, on his knees until dawn if necessary, pleasuring this man who was summarily changing his life.
He'd found a rhythm. Felt the hand at the back of his head tighten just slightly. Heard Adrian say his name, quietly, with nothing professional in it, just his name, in a voice that had lost all of its composure, which was perhaps the most extraordinary thing Jake had ever produced in another person.
He wasn't sure, kneeling there on the warm Nashville night, whether his pleasure emanated from the act itself or of being the source of Adrian's groans of approval. He wasn't sure it mattered. Both things were real. Both were new. Both were his now, whether he wanted them to be or not.
***
Jake’s Wednesday call with Adrian was on the calendar as it always was. Jake dialed in at 10:58. Adrian was already on.
The first forty-five minutes were clean and professional. A competitive threat in the specialty retail space, a challenger brand eating at Forrester's mid-tier positioning. Adrian asked the right questions which significantly sharpened Jake’s strategies, proving the professional value of Adrian as his mentor.
Then Adrian said: "Let's hold the last fifteen minutes for whatever's on your mind. Not professionally." A pause. "I know there's something."
Jake's stomach lurched. "I'm fine," he said, which was so obviously inadequate he almost laughed.
"Jake."
"I don't regret it," he said. "I want to say that first. I've been through it from every angle and I don't regret it."
"All right."
"But it's changed things. In my head. And I don't know if I wanted my head changed." He heard how it sounded. "I'm not blaming you. I'm saying I walked into your room and I came out a different person and I don't know what to do with that person."
"What would doing something with him look like?" Adrian asked.
"I don't know. That's the problem. Before Nashville I had a clear picture. I wasn't missing anything, or I didn't think I was. And now the picture seems incomplete and I can't go back to the incomplete version and I don't know how to build the complete one without blowing up everything I already have."
"You don't have to decide anything," Adrian said. "Not now, possibly not ever. What happened in Nashville doesn't require a verdict. You're allowed to hold it; let it be a thing that happened. That you know about yourself now."
"And if I want to act on it?"
Adrian imperceptivity smiled to himself, “Then we'll figure that out too. I'm not going anywhere, Jake. And I'm not pushing. What I want….", he paused, "…is for you to be all right. That's the actual priority."
Jake sat with that. "You sound like a dad," he said, which came out before he'd decided to say it.
"Would that be so bad?" Adrian asked.
He thought about his own father. What that word had meant in his life. What it might mean coming from this direction. "No," he said. "Actually. Not bad at all."
"Don't make a decision," Adrian said. "But don't close a door just because it scares you. Those are different things."
Jake exhaled. "Okay."
After he hung up, he sat in the quiet of his closed office and felt, if not better, at least less alone in whatever this was.
— Nashville —
"Turn over, hands and knees," Adrian had said. Not a request. His tone had changed, more demanding, more in control. Slightly less comforting. And, once again, Jake's body had responded before his mind heard the words, rolling onto his stomach, as if he’d done this countless times before.
He'd waited, face in the pillow, ass in the air, and searched for a reason why this was wrong. A reason to stop. He searched maniacally. Different reasons flashed through his mind, but none were as compelling as the truth. He was on his hands in knees in the hotel suite of a handsome man waiting to fuck him. That certainty outweighed all the reasons he could think of to stop. It wasn’t rational. It was animalistic. Waiting on his hands and knees, heart pounding, hole clenching and unclenching without him even knowing it. What existed was simply the phrase that had appeared in his mind with an almost embarrassing simplicity: this is right. As though the position fit.
Adrian had been patient in a way Jake hadn't expected and couldn't have prepared for. A gentle kiss to his hole as if he were kissing Jake’s virginity goodbye. The quiet question “Are you ready?” and Jake had only been able to whimper and nod. The slow, deliberate entry to minimize the pain and maximize the pleasure. The breath and exhale that turned the unfamiliar into the welcome, and then the welcome into something Jake had no word for.
And then Adrian had found it. That point, deep inside, that sent a current through Jake's entire nervous system, from the base of his spine to the back of his skull, and Jake had exhaled a sound that had never before left his lips, with the satisfaction of a man who has found exactly what he was looking for, "There it is." And Adrian had proceeded to stay there, relentlessly, with the focused intent of someone who had decided to give Jake something he would not be able to forget. He was right.
"More please, Sir," Jake had heard himself beg. The words had come out of his mouth before he'd known he was going to say them and had not remotely embarrassed him. Jake was being fucked by a man from behind and begged for more. And he was shocked to discover the begging was as pleasurable as the fucking.
***
Cole suggested a beer again on Friday of the following week, framing it as a favor. He needed Jake's read on a work issue. Of course, this wasn't true but Cole knew Jake was more likely to show up for someone else's problem than his own.
They went to a bar three blocks from the office that Cole had chosen deliberately, not the kind of place Forrester people tended to gather. A booth in the back. Draft beer. The low noise of a Friday evening doing its work around them.
Cole's work thing took six minutes to resolve. Then they were in the booth with their beers and no pretense left.
"Can I tell you something?" Cole said.
"Is it about me?" Jake said.
"Observations. You can decide if they're about you."
Jake gestured with his glass.
"You skipped a Monday workout. I didn't know that was physically possible."
"People skip workouts."
"You deferred to Marcus in the competitive review. Twice. On points I know you disagreed with, I could see it on your face."
"Trust your team."
"You’re always looking at your phone during meetings. You’ve never done that.”
Jake said nothing.
"You've closed your office door every day for two weeks. You close it for two kinds of things: calls you don't want overheard and conversations with yourself. I've seen your calendar. The calls aren't there."
Jake put his beer down without drinking. "You are extremely observant and it is very annoying."
Cole leaned forward, forearms on the table. "What happened in Nashville?"
"Nothing happened in Nashville."
"Jake."
The bar moved around them. Jake looked at his glass.
"Something happened in Nashville." His voice was very even. "With Mercer."
Not a question. Jake looked up. Cole's face was steady and waiting.
"He didn't…it wasn't something he did to me. I want to be clear about that."
"Okay."
"It was….” he stopped. Started again. He drank this time and looked at his hands and when he looked up his eyes were brighter than they should have been. "It was the most, I don't know how to say this."
"Take your time."
"I've never felt anything like it." Quiet. Not ashamed. Just honest, in a way he hadn't been in two weeks. "And I don't know what to do with that. I have a life. A career. A version of myself that I had no reason to doubt. And then this thing happened and now I know it exists and I don't know how to put it back."
"Do you want to put it back?" Cole asked. Gently.
Jake looked at him. "No. I don't." Something gave way in his face, briefly. "And that scares the hell out of me."
Cole let the silence sit, then: "Can I tell you something?"
"Go ahead."
"I'm gay."
Jake blinked. Stared. And then, to both of their surprise, he laughed. A real one. The first in two weeks that wasn't artificial. "I know," he said.
"You…" Cole leaned back. "You knew?"
"Cole. I've worked with you for nearly two years. I knew by week three."
"And you never said anything?"
"It's your thing to say." Jake shook his head. "Honestly, it's a relief," Jake said. "You're so good at what you do that I was afraid if I ever made things awkward between us, I'd lose you, and I couldn't afford that."
Cole looked at him. "That's the most Jake Sullivan thing anyone has ever said to me."
"Is it wrong?"
"Not even slightly." Cole picked up his beer. "For the record, I'm not out, exactly. I just don't advertise. There's a difference."
"I'm learning that distinction."
"I have a life," Cole said. "A real one. Friends who've known me since before I knew myself. We go to dinner. We travel. I date. It's not what people imagine when they picture the gay experience. It's just a life. With slightly better restaurants and less pretending to care about football."
"You make it sound very normal," Jake said.
"It is normal. That's the thing nobody tells you. On the other side of the terrifying part, it's just… your life. With more of yourself in it."
Jake was quiet. "I have brothers who would…I don't know what they'd do. A career in and industry that's gotten more progressive but is not… "
"I know," Cole said.
Jake took a deep breath and continued, "I'm not…I don't think I'm gay. I don't think that's the right word." He said this with genuine uncertainty, not defensiveness. "I think I'm something I don't have a word for yet."
"That's fine. Labels don’t matter anyway."
Jake looked at him across the table. "You're very calm about all of this."
"One of us has to be."
A pause. Then Jake, with the tone of a man deciding to go all the way: "He's a top."
Cole processed this. "And you… "
"I…I…bottomed. I didn’t even know there was a word for it, but I've been doing research," Jake said it to his beer glass. His ears went slightly pink. "For the first time. For the only time, so far." He cleared his throat. "I didn't know. About any of it."
Cole looked at the ceiling briefly. Then back. "And?"
"And…" Jake gestured helplessly. "What do you do with that? When you didn't know something like that existed and then suddenly you do?"
"Wrong guy to ask," Cole said. "I'm a top, always have been. I have no idea what you're going through." He paused. "I mean, I've heard about it. At length. Multiple times. Apparently when a new bottom finally figures out what he's been missing, it's a full-blown life crisis. Every single time." He shook his head. "You're not as original as you think you are."
Jake stared at him. "Did you just make a joke?"
"A little. But also not really."
Something adjacent to a smile crossed Jake's face. The first genuine one in two weeks. "Cole. Is he, do you think he…"
"Did he hurt you?" Cole said it directly, looking Jake in the eye.
"No. God, no. Nothing like that. He was…the opposite. At every single step he asked. Or made it so easy for me not to go forward that I could have at any point." He looked at his hands. "I didn't want to not go forward. That's the whole problem."
Cole sat back. The thing that was not mild that lived in his chest settled into something quieter. Not gone. Just quieter. He looked at his friend and thought, all right. That's what this is. He'd figure out his own feelings later. Tonight wasn't for that.
"Are you going to do it again?" Cole asked.
"Yeah," Jake said. "I think so."
"Does he know that?"
"Not yet."
Cole nodded slowly. "For what it's worth, you seem less lost than you did on Monday."
"I told someone," Jake said. "That helped."
"I'm glad you told me."
They sat in the comfortable noise of the bar. Cole finished his beer. Jake finished his.
"Cole."
"Yeah."
"Thank you."
Cole set down his empty glass. "Te quiero, cabrón," he said.
Jake looked at him. It was the same phrase Cole always used, after a presentation nailed, a strategy locked, a long week finally done. The same words, I love you, you bastard. But sitting here, in this booth, after everything Jake had just said out loud for the first time, it didn't land the same way. He wasn't sure if that was the phrase or him. He didn’t know which, but he knew it mattered.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "You too."
— Nashville —
Adrian had rolled him over and pulled out without warning Jake. Thinking he was being punished, he gasped "No" out loud like he was being genuinely deprived. But quickly, Jake was on his back and Adrian was above him, weight distributed, looking down at him with those eyes that didn't miss anything.
"Sir," Jake had whispered. He hadn't planned it. It came out.
"Beautiful boy," Adrian had said back, like they were simply the right words, and had found Jake's wrists and pressed them into the mattress above his head, one in each hand. Held them there.
Jake hadn't fought it. He could have resisted, but had chosen not to, and choosing had been entirely conscious and clear-eyed. Not losing. Deciding. There was a difference. He'd known the difference and had lain there with his wrists held and felt the unmistakable sensation of relief.
Adrian’s cock had found him again, Jake’s hole now begging to be filled. He moved faster than before, Adrian was done coddling. His cock slid in faster and without any stops along the way. One dramatic thrust and he was balls deep. Jake groaned, having learned that this feeling even existed. He was there again, this time better, looking into the eyes of the man who was making it happen. And he could see his pleasure as well, which magnified Jake’s own pleasure tremendously. The angle, the point, that switch that sent the current through him from base to skull, and Jake's body had answered without instruction. The language between them had gotten filthier and more specific as it went, Adrian's voice low and certain, calling him things that should have produced a flinch and instead produced the opposite. “That’s it baby, you’re opening up”, “This is what you were made for, boy”, “I’m gonna breed that hole”, landing in the same place that "Good boy" and "I'm proud of you" had.
When Adrian said "Now”, just the word, one syllable, absolute authority, Jake's free hand had found himself immediately and the release that followed was nothing like any release he'd had before. His back off the mattress, Adrian above him, both of them arriving at exactly the same moment with the same completeness, as though Adrian had orchestrated it, which he had. The feeling of Adrian releasing inside him, that heat, that fullness, that final collapse of weight, was the last piece of something that had worked for all night.
He'd stared at the ceiling afterward and known that his life had changed. Not that it might change. That it had. Already. Irrevocably. The person who'd knocked on that door at 9:00 was not the person lying in the amber light with warm cum dripping down his thighs. He didn't know yet what the new person required. He knew he was going to find out.
***
Four weeks after Nashville, on a Wednesday afternoon call, Adrian mentioned the next Board meeting in passing, scheduled for Atlanta, where Forrester’s headquarters were. The Forrester team, including Jake, wouldn’t need to travel, but Darius had booked the full group into the Hyatt Regency downtown where the meeting would be held. Atlanta traffic being what it was, he considered it a bonding exercise, keeping the group together, building the kind of easy familiarity that made board meetings more productive and occasionally more honest. The Board members would be coming in from out of town as always. Nobody commuted.
Jake filed this information with the attention he wouldn’t have a few short weeks ago. On one hand, two days with the Board to strut his stuff would’ve been exactly what he’d liked. But now there was a new dimension. Two, possibly three, nights in the same hotel as Adrian. He told himself he would deal with it later, which was the same thing he had been telling himself about several things for four weeks.
What he didn't know was that Adrian had already made his own plans for the weekend before the meeting.
* * *
Atlanta had a gay scene that rewarded people who knew what they were looking for. And Adrian knew exactly what he was looking for. He'd been to the city a handful of times over the years, his company, Hawthorne Row had a flagship store in Buckhead, and he had friends there, the kind of friendships that would welcome seeing Adrian. He flew in Saturday morning, spent the afternoon with two of them, and by 9PM was at a bar in Midtown, Atlanta’s gay mecca, that was the opposite of the club scene. Upscale, but not ostentatious, a room with good bourbon and a crowd of men who knew the difference between a good drink and a strong one. No drag shows. No fog machines. Just well-dressed men of all ages and good music at a volume that still allowed for conversation.
He'd done his research before coming. That was Adrian's way. He knew that Cole Ramirez officed at Forrester’s headquarters in Atlanta with Jake, that he was Jake's right hand and that he played an important, albeit unspecified, role in Jake’s life. He’d learned from social media Cole had an active social life that included bars like the one he’d coincidentally (or not) found himself in. He hadn't come to the bar specifically to find Cole, he’d come because it was a Saturday night and his friends had moved on and he wasn't ready to go back to the hotel. But when he saw Cole across the room, he felt the satisfaction of a man whose instincts have just been confirmed.
Cole was with a group of three other men, enjoying the evening. He was the largest presence in the group by a significant margin, that was the first thing, the sheer physicality of him. The way his fitted shirt might well have been the inspiration Jake needed to add the muscle he did. He was laughing at something one of his friends had said, head back, genuine. Adrian watched him for a moment, then caught the bartender's eye and ordered a round for Cole's table.
“Tell him it’s from Adrian,” he said to the server, “and point me out.”
He watched the server deliver the drinks and lean in and gesture in his direction. He watched Cole turn, take him in, and hold the look for a beat. Then Cole said something to his friends, picked up his new drink, and crossed the room with a pace that seemed intentionally leisurely.
He was, Adrian thought as he approached, exactly what Jake’s descriptions had implied and considerably more in person. The physicality of him was the first thing, that sheer, trained mass that the fitted shirt barely contained. If his intellect and marketing savvy mirrored his physique, he could see why Jake valued him so highly.
“Adrian Mercer,” Cole said. Not a question. Not yet a greeting.
“Cole Ramirez.” Adrian extended his hand. “I recognized you from Jake’s Instagram.”
Cole shook it. His grip said everything about him. “Jake doesn’t post much.”
“No. But you’re in the ones he does.” Adrian gestured to the stool beside him. “Join me for a few minutes if you’re willing.”
Cole considered this for a moment, not warily exactly, his mind racing with how he was going to play this. He sat. “He’s mentioned you,” he said. The words were even, intentional. He wasn’t offering what he knew. He was waiting to see what Adrian would offer first.
“All good things, I hope,” Adrian said, playing along with this game of cat-and-mouse.
“Professionally, yes. He thinks very highly of what you’ve done for him.” Cole picked up his drink. “He’s mentioned you in almost every conversation we’ve had since Nashville.”
Something in Adrian’s expression registered this without showing it. “He’s talented,” he said. “Easy to invest in. You’d know that better than anyone.”
“I would,” Cole said, once again with intention. It wasn’t hostile, but it wasn’t warm, either.
Adrian looked at him with the frank attention he brought to situations that interested him. He’d expected Cole to be sharp and he’d gotten sharp. What he hadn’t expected was this: the low- intensity of a man who had personal stakes in their shared interest, Jake, and was too disciplined to let them show. Adrian had read a lot of men in his life. He revised his read on Cole Ramirez significantly upward in real time.
“He talks about you the same way,” Adrian said. “Not the way a manager talks about a good employee. The way someone talks about a person they genuinely trust. That’s rarer than people think.”
Cole held the look. “He doesn’t give that easily,” he said. “Which is what makes it worth something.” A pause that was half a beat too long. “From either direction.”
The three words hung there. From either direction. It was not an accusation and it was not a warning. It was a man letting another man know that he knew, that he understood what they were talking about, even if neither of them were going to say it.
Adrian sipped his bourbon and let it sit. “He’s going through something,” he said finally. “I imagine you’ve noticed.”
“I have,” Cole said.
“I want what’s good for him,” Adrian said. He said it with the steadiness of a man who believed it, which he did, in the way that a man can believe something and also want to win.
Cole looked at him for a long moment. Something moved in his expression, very briefly, not suspicion exactly, but like a man whose suspicion has just been confirmed and is deciding what to do about it. “So do I,” Cole said, with a weight behind it that Adrian heard clearly.
Neither of them said anything for a moment. The bar moved around them, indifferent. Two men at a bar in Midtown Atlanta on a Saturday night, talking about a third man who was presumably asleep approximately 15 miles away, entirely unaware of any of this. The conversation had been, on its surface, perfectly civilized. Underneath it, something had been established that both of them understood and neither of them would acknowledge.
They each had their claim. They both knew it. They both knew the other knew it. And none of it had been said aloud, which meant none of it could be challenged, which was exactly how both of them preferred it.
When Cole stood to return to his friends, he extended his hand.
“Good to meet you,” he said. His voice was even. His grip, again, said more.
“And you,” Adrian said. He meant it, which surprised him slightly.
He watched Cole cross back to his group, say something low that made the three men glance briefly in Adrian’s direction, and then the group folded around him and the moment closed. Adrian turned back to the bar. He picked up his bourbon. He looked at it for a moment without drinking it.
He had come to Atlanta expecting to move pieces into position ahead of the Board meeting. He’d found, instead, that at least one of the pieces had its own agenda and was considerably more formidable than he had anticipated. Cole Ramirez was not simply Jake’s right hand. Cole Ramirez was in love with Jake, or close enough that the distinction didn’t matter, and he was watching, and he was patient, and he was smart enough to play a long game.
Adrian found this more interesting than inconvenient.
He signaled for the check. He left a generous tip. He walked out into the warm Atlanta night thinking about the Board meeting three days away, about Room 714 and everything it had started, about the possibilites of a situation that had more variables in it than he’d initially estimated.
He thought: this is going to be more interesting than I planned.
He thought: good.
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