CHAPTER 12
Will
I’d been worried, when Vaughn and I started dating, or whatever you call it, that it meant I’d be attending even more boring parties than I already did for my sister. Luckily, that didn’t seem to be the case. He always offered me the opportunity to go if I wanted to, but I very rarely wanted to. Hell, he barely wanted to go to a lot of them. But sometimes I’d head over to his D.C. apartment so I’d be there when he got back, and he’d look hot in a suit and amuse me with stories, and then we’d go to bed. That was the best of both worlds in my opinion.
When we actually did go out, we went all kinds of places, from restaurants that were expensive, yes, but worth the price, to local bars, to movie theatres. My only knowledge of people who had as much money as Vaughn did came from television and the movies, so I was a bit abashed to realize I hadn’t given him enough credit when it came to dating, and how he’d want to take me places I would like.
One such place was a Japanese restaurant that just opened down the block from his apartment. Sushi was something we both loved, even though I liked the complicated rolls that Vaughn called “Americanized.”
We were just settling into our steamed gyoza appetizer when a shadow fell over the table.
“Will?”
I looked up at the familiar voice, and there stood Harris Parks, my ex-boyfriend. Harris was the only serious relationship I’d had, the majority of my romantic encounters since then having been casual dating or the rare one-night stand. Harris and I had broken up more than a decade ago, and we’d only run into each other a few times since then. It hadn’t been the worst breakup, but was full of awkwardness and silent resentment nonetheless. “Hey, Harris.”
“I thought that was you.” Harris looked like he hadn’t aged a day since I’d met him in grad school, when he’d been studying non-profit management and I’d been getting my master’s in art history.
I stood up and we exchanged the kind of hug you give someone you used to fuck more than a decade ago, but definitely didn’t want to fuck again. “This is Amory Vaughn,” I said, introducing Vaughn to Harris. “Vaughn, this is Harris Parks.” I wondered if he knew this was my ex, if I’d ever mentioned him by name and not just as a prefix.
Polite as ever, Vaughn stood and shook Harris’s hand. Though I was over the way things had ended with Harris, I found I felt slightly smug at how tall Vaughn was, comparatively. Harris had always been self-conscious about his height.
“You still at NPR?” I asked. Harris was the annual fund director, soliciting money for public radio by sending an obscene amount of direct mail. He’d always joked that he got his degree in management to fold donation letters.
Harris nodded. “Yeah. For a few more weeks, anyway,” he said. “Ben got a job, tenure track, at Indiana University.”
Harris had always had a thing for academics, and Ben was a history professor. Maybe mentioning the guy he’d cheated on me with—and then married—was his version of me being smug about how tall Vaughn was. Or maybe I was overthinking things, as usual. “That’s great,” I said. “You have anything lined up?”
“WFIU, yeah. It’s the public radio station on campus.” said Harris. “I’ve been promised work-study students to fold all the letters. How about you? Still with the FBI?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t say anything else, because Harris had never liked hearing anything about my job. “When are you moving?”
“In about three weeks, actually.” Harris smiled, and there was nothing unhappy or bitter in the expression. “I’m glad I ran into you.”
“Same here. Best of luck. Tell Ben congrats on the job.”
We shook hands, Harris gave me one last hug, gave Vaughn a polite “Nice to meet you,” and went on his way. I realized that I’d probably never see him again.
It was strange to watch a person who used to mean so much to me walk out of my life and feel nothing. Was I supposed to feel something? Some sense of loss, or what might have been?
Mostly I was just hungry. I dipped another gyoza in the sauce. “That was the only other boyfriend I’ve ever had,” I explained. “Ben, his husband? That’s the guy he cheated on me with. And then he invited me to their wedding.” I shook my head. “I didn’t go. I didn’t send a present either.” I had, however, sent back the RSVP regret card.
“How vicious of you, darling,” Vaughn said. He was looking at me like he wanted to strip all my bits and pieces apart and spread them on the table. “So I’m your boyfriend, am I?”
Immediately my face went hot and I set my chopsticks down. Oh, god, had I really just—fuck, did I just say that? I cleared my throat, glancing around, anywhere but Vaughn. This was why I hated dating. I liked knowing where I stood with someone. I liked rules. And when it came to dating there weren’t any. Especially when you happened to be dating Amory Vaughn. “Um.”
He took my hand and I looked up at him. He was smiling widely, and he kissed my hand. “Are you asking me to go steady, William?”
I narrowed my eyes at him and tilted my chin up. It probably looked like I was about to punch him. “Dating, boyfriend, whatever. I just meant—”
“I know what you meant,” he interrupted, letting my hand go. “It’s fine, of course. I’m teasing you.”
Well, great. But now I wanted to know—no, this was stupid. We were dating. In a relationship. Whatever. “You don’t have to, you know.”
“Tease you?” Vaughn grinned. “I beg to differ.”
“Be my boyfriend,” I mumbled, because apparently I couldn’t let it go.
“I don’t do anything I don’t want to do,” said Vaughn, and his voice was amused. “I’d think you’d know that by now. But I’d like to be. Of course I would,” he added.
I gave a theatrical sigh, still embarrassed but also…happy. Very happy. “All right. Great. Glad we got that cleared up.”
“I know how you like things to be official,” Vaughn agreed, leaning back in his seat. “Shall I call a notary?”
“Shall I suck your cock later, or do you want to keep being funny?”
He winked at me. “So that was your ex-boyfriend, eh?”
Oh, right. The reason for the boyfriend talk in the first place. I nodded, suddenly interested in what Vaughn thought of him. I was fascinated by Vaughn’s ability to read people immediately. He liked to figure out what people were hiding. He’d be a good profiler, come to think of it. If we ignored the part where he liked to commit larceny. “What’d you think?”
He thought about it as he sipped his sake. “That it must have ended not with a bang but with a whimper.”
That was true, but I wanted to hear his reasoning, so I gave nothing away and just waited.
“Ah, is this your interrogation face, William? All right, let’s see. Well, he didn’t ask for any details about your job and his nostrils flared at those three letters, so I’m guessing he was never fond of your chosen career.”
I snorted. “That’s an understatement.”
“What was his issue with the FBI?”
I gave him my best Agent Fox expression and said coolly, “Why don’t you tell me?”
Vaughn’s eyebrows went up; he liked the game.
“Hmm. Perhaps he feared such a traditionally macho job would force him into the closet by proxy…but I know you’ve never been in the closet at work so I imagine that isn’t it.”
I gave him a salute with my sake. “You imagined right.”
“He was uncomfortable around your coworkers,” Vaughn said, and I could almost see him running back over everything he’d noticed about Harris during our brief encounter.
I nodded. “Since I was in the Academy. He came to meet me for lunch exactly once, and then decided not to because he didn’t want me to get shit for having a boyfriend.”
“Or he didn’t want to get shit for being your boyfriend,” Vaughn said softly.
I smiled wryly. “Right. I’d tell him all the time that I didn’t care, that people could think what they wanted, but…I think a lot of the guys I was at the Academy with were the same kind of guys who gave Harris shit for being gay in high school.”
Guys like Brett Lawson, who had been in my class at the Academy and now worked in Violent Crimes. Harris had taken one look at Lawson and decided that he didn’t want anything to do with the FBI. Never mind that my colleagues in the Art Crimes Unit weren’t pricks like Lawson.
“I can’t imagine that would be enough for you to stop dating someone,” Vaughn mused. “If you truly cared about them?”
“Well, no. It wasn’t just showing up at things. Hell, you know how I feel about parties. We had this…insular life in graduate school, right. We weren’t the only gay people in our friend group. Everyone there was…pretty liberal, open-minded. We moved in together when we graduated, and Harris got a job at NPR. If I hadn’t joined the FBI, I think things would have stayed the way they were.”
“But you did join the FBI. And he didn’t want you to?”
“He never came out and said it. But I knew anyway. I’d always made it clear I was going to though.”
Vaughn gave a low, warm laugh. “And I know how difficult it is to change your mind.”
I flushed, but this time it wasn’t with embarrassment. “Yeah, well, this wasn’t…this wasn’t something anyone could have talked me out of. It’s what I wanted to do since I first learned of the existence of the Art Crimes team, and I’d planned my graduate career with the goal of joining the FBI after completing my master’s. Trying to talk me out of it would have been like telling me to be someone else.”
Vaughn’s eyes were narrowed thoughtfully.
I sipped my sake again and waved a hand. “Whatever it is, just say it.”
“He did want you to be someone else. He was just too afraid to tell you.”
“Basically. He never fought with me. He never…he just let me be, and I thought that was the same as letting me be me, but it wasn’t. We didn’t fight, because we didn’t talk. I did my thing and he didn’t like it, and I didn’t like that he was so…”
“What?”
I wasn’t quite sure how to say it. “Passive,” I said, finally. “Which doesn’t make sense, does it? I would have hated him trying to make me someone I wasn’t, but I also was mad that he didn’t even try.”
Vaughn, who had some preternatural ability to know when the server was approaching the table, went quiet as our sushi was delivered. “It makes sense,” he said when we were alone again. “We can tell when we’re failing to meet someone’s expectations, when we’re not the person they want us to be. Quiet disappointment is just as hurtful.”
“I hate it,” I said bluntly. “Yelling, at least I know where I stand, you know? I can deal with conflict, and I’d prefer it to the…whatever he was doing. Suffering? I don’t know. But we grew apart, he met Ben, and they were fucking for six months before I found out about it. Which I did, by the way, by walking in on them. I think Harris had been trying to get me to notice and gave up and went for the obvious.”
“So you had to break up with him,” Vaughn said, selecting a piece of sashimi.
I’d gotten an inside-out fried roll just to watch him squirm, since he’d never be so rude as to insult someone’s food. “Yup, because he didn’t want to be the one to do it,” I said. “I should have done it long before then, anyway. I don’t know that it’s fair of me to accuse him of being passive when I didn’t do anything about the situation either. It’s not like I was the one doing the yelling.”
“Ah, my William,” said Vaughn, affection in every syllable of my name. “Only you would think something like that was supposed to be fair.”
“Well, I just meant, you know.” I gestured with my chopsticks before picking up a piece of my roll. The hostess sat a loud, obviously inebriated party at the table next to us. Their excitable chatter meant I had to practically shout for Vaughn to hear me. “I should have been clear and said it wasn’t working, but I didn’t want to hurt him.”
Vaughn glanced over at the group seated next to us with an offended frown, clearly annoyed that he had to raise his voice to converse with me when I was right across the table. He had the most impeccable manners of anyone I’d ever met. “Instead, you just assigned him to the roommate category in your mind, and went on with your life?”
I wouldn’t have thought of it that way, but…yeah. “That’s exactly what I did. I went to work and didn’t tell him about it because I knew he didn’t want to know. I went climbing—which he hated—and he stopped inviting me to NPR parties. Thank god,” I added, which made Vaughn smile.
“For the record, I think it’s incredibly sexy that you go mountain climbing,” Vaughn said. “And I have absolutely no desire to do it with you.”
“Neither did Harris, really,” I said. “He just didn’t like it that I didn’t want him there, I guess. It was a long time ago. We were young. I’m sure I could have done a lot of things better too. I let him have the apartment.” I made a face. “And the bed.”
“Because that’s where you found them fucking?” asked Vaughn. “Subtle.”
“Hmm? Oh, no. They were fucking on the couch. The bed just sucked.”
Vaughn snagged another piece of sushi. “You delight me, William.” He raised his voice to be heard over the raucous table to our right.
Well, that was nice to know. “You delight me, too,” I said. “And sometimes you infuriate me.”
His slow smile made me want to drop to my knees under the table, slide my hands up his thighs, and suck him off right there. Instead, I shifted in my chair and drank some more sake, getting myself under control so I could excuse myself to the restroom.
When I made my way back to the table, I passed the group of loud diners, now seated on the other side of the restaurant, and a couple of them gave me a glare. Next to our table, I noticed the servers were busy separating the tables and re-setting them for smaller parties. I slid into my seat with a raised eyebrow look at Vaughn. “Did I miss something?”
Vaughn glanced at me. “Yes, I ordered us more sake.” He picked up the little carafe and refilled my glass.
I stared at him. “So that group of people just…what? Wanted to move to another table?”
Vaughn’s innocent look was laughable. “They moved, yes.”
“You know I’m trained to tell when people are lying, right?”
Vaughn’s eyes glinted at me. “So I hear.”
Before I could say anything, a man stopped by our table. The manager, who apologized to Vaughn for the “inconvenience” and said that he hoped the solution was satisfactory.
I waited until the manager moved away before pointing my chopstick at him accusingly. “You totally made them move that group of people.”
“They were rather excruciatingly loud, William.”
“Right. So…maybe you could have asked for us to move? There’s just two of us. It’d be way easier than having a group that size be re-seated.”
He looked at me, and I saw there was honest puzzlement on his features, as if that had never occurred to him. “I simply expressed my displeasure to the management and asked for them to resolve the issue.”
“By moving them,” I said flatly.
Vaughn leaned back in his seat and gave me a shrewd glance. “Why do I have the distinct feeling you’re about to lecture me?”
“It’s not a lecture,” I huffed, though fine, maybe it was. “It’s just…could you not do that?”
“Did someone say something to you?”
The protectiveness in Vaughn’s voice was a little sweet, a lot unnecessary, and just a bit annoying. “No, that’s not the point. I just don’t like when you do that kind of thing.”
“Make an annoying situation go away?”
I couldn’t tell if he honestly didn’t get it, or was being obtuse on purpose. I sipped my sake. “It bothers me how easily you manipulate people into doing what you want.”
“William, I think you’re being a bit dramatic,” Vaughn said. “They were very rude and it was impossible to hear.”
“I know they were. But it still would have been way easier for everyone if we’d just moved.”
“It wouldn’t have been easier for us. And we weren’t the ones being intolerable, darling.”
“Like I said.” I shook my head. “Delightful, and infuriating. Is that how you navigate life when you’re rich? You pay to make situations go away?”
“If you must put it so crudely,” Vaughn allowed. “From your disapproving tone, I surmise it’s not your preferred way to deal with aggravations.”
“No. I would have just asked to move.”
“Then you’re inconvenienced,” he argued. “On top of being aggravated.”
“Then I’ve fixed the situation to my liking,” I corrected. “In a way that was easier for everyone. Especially the servers. Did you think about how much of a pain that was for them? What if their server lost a table and a large tip because you had them moved into another section?”
Vaughn was giving me an indulgent look. “In future, I will attempt to ameliorate aggravations without inconveniencing others. All right?”
“Or you could stop using your money to manipulate people,” I said. It sounded harsh, so I reached across the table and took his hand. “I like being here with you, okay? I’d like being here with you even if you didn’t have the money or clout that makes restaurant managers do what you want.”
“I want you to enjoy yourself,” he said and gave my hand a squeeze. Vaughn never had a problem showing affection in public. “And what is the point of having this ‘clout,’ as you call it, if I can’t make things as pleasurable for you as possible?”
I knew he meant what he said, even if I was still frustrated he wasn’t getting the point. “I’m not dating your money or your clout, Amory. I’m dating you. And the world is full of loud drunk people and a thousand other annoyances you can’t fix. But you make me happy. Just you.”
His eyes softened. “You make me happy, too.” He paused, nostrils flaring elegantly. “Even more so when I can actually hear what you’re saying.”
I rolled my eyes, snorted a laugh I couldn’t quite help, and held out my glass for more sake. “Delightful, infuriating, and impossible.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Vaughn said, and refilled my glass.
I was a little drunk as we walked back to Vaughn’s. I liked the Falls Church house, but the apartment was more my style. And Vaughn’s too, I assumed. Everything was top-of-the-line, simple, clean and modern just like his preferred sushi.
Vaughn took my hand. At my startle, he squeezed it. “Is this not all right? Here I thought boyfriends held hands.”
Great, I was never going to live that down. “Of course it’s all right,” I assured him. And it was. I just wasn’t used to it. Harris hadn’t been one for public affection outside of designated areas. “I’m not gonna do that again,” I said as we walked, returning to the conversation about Harris. Vaughn’s hand was warm around mine. If people gave us weird looks, I didn’t notice. “If you want me to be someone I’m not, I need to know about it.”
“I don’t want you to be anyone else,” Vaughn assured me. He tugged me closer. “Well. I do wish you had better taste in sushi. Those razzle-dazzle rolls you like miss the spirit of Japanese food.” He had to let go of my hand to pull out the entry card for the building.
“And what’s that?”
“Its beauty lies in its simplicity, its perfection, its balance,” said Vaughn, holding the door open for me.
“Maybe I just like things that are complicated,” I said, eyes glued to Vaughn as he swiped the card that would take the elevator to his penthouse. “After Harris, I dated this guy who was an extreme sports fanatic for about two months. He liked climbing, but then he wanted to jump off the top and go hang-gliding when we got up there.”
“And that wasn’t complicated enough for you?” Vaughn asked, moving closer, trapping me with my back to the elevator wall as the doors closed.
“That’s not complicated,” I murmured, shivering pleasantly as he slid a thigh between my legs and moved closer. “That’s just having a death wish.”
“And do you think I’m complicated?” Vaughn asked, leaning in to kiss me.
“You’re an inside-out sushi roll for sure,” I agreed, and he laughed against my mouth.
But I wasn’t actually kidding. Harris had often bored me, and Rory tired me with his constant inability to be present in the moment unless it involved throwing himself off a summit. I’d always imagined that whoever it was I wanted would be somewhere in between. I’d just given up hope that he existed.
And then I met Amory Vaughn.