Chapter Fifteen

Ethan

The knock came a half second before the door opened, which was not how knocking  was supposed to work, and by the time Ethan’s mind caught up to what had happened, it was already too late to matter.

He and Julian sprang apart the way two people do when they’ve been caught at something, though nothing had actually happened yet , a fraction of an inch of space still hung between them when the door swung wide, Ethan’s hand still resting where it had drifted to Julian’s jaw, Julian’s breath still audible in the sudden quiet.

“Sorry, I didn’t realize you were still in a session.” Preston Wade stood in the doorway, one hand still on the handle, his expression setting itself into polite apology, a beat too smoothly to be entirely convincing. His eyes moved from Ethan to Julian and back again, slow and deliberate.“I can come back.”

Julian was already moving. He grabbed his jacket off the chair, mumbled something about the revisions being sent over by morning, and was out the door before Ethan could say a word, brushing past Preston without quite meeting his eyes. Ethan heard his footsteps exiting fast down the hallway, faster than the situation should have required, and something in his chest twisted at the sound of it, embarrassment, and something worse. The particular, familiar shame of watching someone else absorb the fallout of his own carelessness.

The door clicked shut. Preston hadn’t moved.

“Was there something you needed,” Ethan said, forcing his voice back into its usual register, cool and unbothered, though his pulse was doing something violent underneath it.

“There was, actually.” Preston crossed the office slowly, the way he did everything, and lowered himself into the chair Julian had vacated as if he had every right to it. “But it can wait. That looked important.”

“It was a manuscript discussion.”

“Of course it was.” Preston’s mouth curved, not quite a smile. “You always stand that close to your contractors when you’re discussing chapter endings?”

Ethan’s stomach dropped, a cold, sinking lurch he did his best not to show on his face. “I don’t see how that’s relevant to whatever brought you up here.”

“No, I don’t suppose you would.” Preston leaned back, studying him with the patience of a man who had all the time in the world and knew it. “You know, I’ve worked in this business a long time, Mr. Cross. I’ve seen a lot of executives with a lot of careful, curated lives. It’s remarkable, honestly, how much effort men like you put into looking like nothing’s underneath the surface.” He tilted his head. “And how little it actually takes to prove otherwise.”

The threat was there, wrapped in language soft enough to deny if Ethan ever tried to repeat it back to anyone. That was the skill of it. Nothing Preston said could ever be quoted directly, and yet the meaning landed with total clarity: I know, and I can make it easy for others to know too.

Ethan’s mind raced through every version of a response. Deny it outright, threaten him back or have Lena fire him immediately and take him out of the building. He discarded each one almost as quickly as they formed in his thoughts.

Denial would sound as it were in this state he was.

Threats would only confirm there was something worth threatening him over. And firing him might raise exactly the kind of questions Ethan couldn't afford anyone to start asking. 

He was, for the first time in longer than he could remember, entirely out of good options.

“What do you want,” Ethan said quietly.

Preston’s expression shifted at that, something pleased passed between his eyes.

He stood, unbuttoning his jacket as he rounded the desk, slow enough that Ethan had every opportunity to stop him and somehow still couldn’t make himself do it, couldn’t make himself do anything except sit very still and calculate, over and over, exactly how much this man actually knew and exactly how much damage he could do with it.

“Nothing dramatic,” Preston said, close now, close enough that Ethan could smell his cologne, sharp and synthetic, nothing like the low, clean warmth he’d been breathing in ten minutes earlier. “I’m not interested in ruining your life, Mr. Cross. I like my job. I like this building. I’d just like you to stop pretending you don’t notice me.”

His hand landed on Ethan’s chest, flat, deliberate, the same gesture from days earlier except there was no folder this time, no pretense of business to hide behind. Ethan’s jaw locked. Every instinct in his body screamed at him to grab the wrist and break it, consequences be damned.

He didn’t move.

He thought of Julian’s face in the doorway a moment ago, pale and startled, already halfway out before the door had finished opening. He thought of the leak, the headlines, the board, twelve years of careful architecture that a single photograph had already come close to knocking down once this month. He thought, with a kind of sick clarity, that a man who had just watched him almost kiss another man in his own office was, at this exact moment, the single most dangerous person in the building, and that dangerous people did not respond well to being refused.

So he let it happen.

Preston’s hand slid lower, deliberate, pausing to feel the tension in Ethan’s stomach before continuing down, fingers curling, possessively, against his cock, testing, claiming something that wasn’t his to claim. Ethan stared straight ahead at a fixed point on the wall and made himself breathe, made himself hold perfectly, terribly still, the way he imagined a man might hold still through a procedure he couldn’t consent to but also couldn’t stop.

Preston's voice cut through his dissociation. “It's as huge as I imagined,” he whispered.

His hands crawled over his forearm and took his hand guiding it to the front of his trousers and Ethan almost lost it audibly grunting. 

He closed his eyes when he felt the hardness of Preston’s cock. He wanted to vomit. 

It lasted only a few seconds. It felt considerably longer.

“There,” Preston murmured, withdrawing his hand as easily as he’d offered it, straightening Ethan’s tie with the same two fingers he’d used days before, an absurd, almost tender gesture layered over something that had nothing tender in it at all. “That wasn’t so difficult, was it?”

Ethan said nothing. He couldn’t have trusted his own voice even if he’d tried.

Preston studied him a moment longer, something satisfied and unbothered in his expression, then stepped back, straightened his jacket, and walked toward the door as though nothing at all had happened, as though he hadn’t just spent the last several minutes making it abundantly clear exactly how much power he now held over a man who had spent twelve years making sure no one ever held any.

“I’ll let you get back to your manuscript discussion,” Preston said, one hand on the door. “Give my best to Mr. Hayes.”

The door shut behind him with the same soft, deliberate click it always did.

Ethan remained exactly where he was for a long time. He wasn’t sure how long. Long enough that the city outside his window went fully dark, long enough that his hands, when he finally looked down at them, were not entirely steady.

He thought about calling security. He thought about calling Lena, or a lawyer, or Claire. He thought about all of the things a rational man in his position ought to do, and did none of them, because every single option led back to the same unbearable place,  a conversation he could not have without admitting the thing underneath it, the thing he’d spent his entire adult life making sure no one had the power to use against him.

Except now someone did.

He poured himself a drink he didn’t finish and sat in the dark long after everyone else had gone home, staring at nothing.

His phone buzzed once, near midnight. He flinched before he even looked at it, some part of him already braced for another unknown number.

It wasn’t. It was Julian.

Julian: Are you okay? 

Ethan stared at the message for a long time, thumb hovering over the screen, half a dozen honest answers rising and dying before he could type any of them.

Ethan: I’m fine. Get some rest.

He set the phone face-down on the desk and closed his eyes, and told himself, the way he’d told himself so many things over the years, that he would find a way to handle it.

He wasn’t entirely sure he believed it.