I will. Have a good flight. Text me when you’re home, okay?
Of course. Anything for you.
18
Damien
After far too long spent locked inside the airplane’s bathroom stall, Damien emerged to find no fewer than six people lined up outside. Every one of them glared at him. He lifted a brow in defiance, shrugged, and told the balding potbellied man in the Hawaiian shirt at the front of the line, “You might want to give it a minute to air out. It’s a hot mess in there.”
There was no mess in there to speak of—at least, none that would leave a smell—but no one needed to know. Satisfied with his mischief, Damien returned to his seat and glanced out the window. Clouds blocked his view of what lay below. It was just as well—there’d be nothing to see but the stretches of ocean separating himself from Matthew.
The good mood he’d been in decayed.
What was he going to do about Gwynn?
Clouds passed beneath the plane. The bathroom line shortened, then ceased to be. Damien, no closer to a solution, sighed heavily and slumped in his seat. When it came to something as delicate as romantically pursuing his friend’s son, there would be no weaseling out of the truth. If he wanted to keep his friendship with Gwynn, he had to be honest.
Honesty sucked a metric fuckton of balls, but for Matthew?
For Matthew, it felt worth it.
So it was, thirty thousand feet in the air, that Damien opened a new email and started to compose a letter to the friend he’d wronged.
* * *
The second Damien’s taxi pulled curbside, he knew something was off. The Goldcorp Group building looked the same as it always did—which was to say lofty, imposing, and intimidating as fuck—but there was something in the air that hadn’t been there when Damien had left.
It smelled like bullshit.
After twenty-two hellish hours spent in transit and no less than fifteen attempts to pen the most difficult email of his life, Damien was having none of it. He stepped out of the taxi and cut toward the building, shoulders back and chin elevated. With his day-old stubble and the dark bags beneath his eyes, he was aware he looked like shit, but he didn’t let that stop him. If anything, looking like he’d just crawled out of a sewer would work to his benefit. Smart people didn’t fuck with crazy, and Damien was primed to go full bananapants.
With gusto, Damien thrust open the door and strode into the building like a hurricane—eerily calm and composed at the center, but turbulent to the point of destruction to anything in his path. One of the ladies working the front desk lifted her chin to greet him, then went pale, purposely dropped her pen on the floor, and ducked beneath the table to find it. By the time Damien made it to the back elevators, she hadn’t emerged.
Good. Fear was good.
If Damien was lucky, the silent rage ripping the Goldcorp Group building apart would zero in on Bankes and punish him for being an absolute shithead while Damien was gone on vacation. If he was especially lucky, it’d chase Geller out of hiding and rip him a new one, too. If it weren’t for them, Damien would still be sipping kava out of a coconut bowl and eating lovo on the beach while enjoying the view—namely, Matthew’s ass in that jaw-dropping speedo. Those responsible for abruptly ending what was shaping up to be the best week of his life would pay.
A newbie analyst, likely freshly plucked from college based on his baby face, waited by the elevators. When he saw Damien, he mumbled something about a coffee order and fled. The elevator doors opened a second later, and with no company other than his brewing rage, Damien ascended to the executive floor. The smell of bullshit was stronger here—if he followed it, he was sure it’d lead straight to a certain rival looking to do him in for good.
“Um, Mr. Bigg, sir?” one of Damien’s account managers mumbled as he fell into line at Damien’s side. Damien didn’t break stride. If he stopped and engaged, he’d lose momentum, and he needed to hit Bankes full fucking blast to get his point across.
“What is it, Luczak?”
“Mr. Whitcroft just left, and—”
“What?” Damien came to a sudden stop, doing everything in his power to keep his face an impartial mask. “Whitcroft was here?”
“Not even ten minutes ago.” Luczak looked like he might shit himself. He swallowed nervously. “Bankes had been by to see him about the Stendahl case, and he was following up wi—”
“Oh, holy fucking shit,” Damien breathed. Murdering Bankes was knocked from the top of his priority list. The cyclonic rage he’d let spin out of control weakened, and Damien scrambled to pull himself back together. If Bankes had been to talk to Whitcroft directly, it meant he knew that Damien was on the warpath. In retaliation, the bastard was doing everything in his power to make sure that Damien never got the chance to launch a counterattack.
“Sir?” Luczak asked meekly, but Damien was already on the move. He didn’t have time to spare. If his boss was involved, it meant that shit was about to get bad—real bad—and he’d need all his energy to invest in plunging the mess before the build-up burst his pipes.
The confrontation with Bankes was going to have to wait. Hell, Gwynn’s email was going to have to pop a squat on the back burner. There was a crisis that needed Damien’s immediate attention. Everything else would have to wait for a later day.
* * *
At eleven that evening, after a day spent kissing the worst kind of ass, Damien slumped onto his desk and indulged in thirty seconds of nothingness. What a shitshow of a day it had been. Between a long and difficult meeting with Whitcroft, a solid eight hours spent in the legal department babysitting a room of grown-ass men, and more phone calls and text exchanges with Stendahl than he could count, he’d managed to keep the contract, but had almost lost his sanity in the process.
