CHAPTER 24
Vaughn
I woke with a head full of cotton and the distinct sense that I had forgotten to do something important. It was early—out the window, the sun still fell weakly upon the snow—and I should’ve gone back to sleep. But then, as if we were magnets, I felt Will’s presence in the house. I could see him, tucked up in the room at the end of the hall, backpack resting on the chair. Had he even brought pajamas, or had he fled D.C. in a hurry, leaving him naked in my bed? The wrong one of my beds, yes, but it was a vast improvement. He had come here. I could work with that.
As I showered off the week’s downward spiral, I gave myself a stern lecture to listen to what he had to say, even if I already knew I’d been wrong. To let him take the lead, since I’d already bungled things so badly.
When I went into the kitchen in the hopes of finding something to make us for breakfast though, William was already there.
“Morning,” he said.
In the thin sunlight coming through the windows, I could see lines of stress and exhaustion on his face. I could see pain there, and regret. And, as I stepped closer and he looked up from fiddling with the coffee maker, I thought I saw hope there too.
“I couldn’t fall back asleep,” he said, gesturing to the appliance as if his lack of a healthy eight hours were what was interfering with his inability to make it function. “I made a fire and fed the cat,” he added.
I took over for him, measuring out the espresso, adjusting the levers. But he didn’t move far away, and I took a chance that perhaps that meant something. He let me run my palm over his cheek, let me look at him. I ran a thumb over his eyebrow, and pushed his hair back where it fell softly across his forehead.
I could see a hundred thoughts that he wanted to voice, but he closed his eyes and sighed.
“I can’t believe you came here,” I said.
“You’re not the only one who can be impulsive.”
Oh, William, bravado even in the midst of exhaustion. I couldn’t help but smile.
“Besides,” he said, scuffing a wool-socked toe on the wood floor. “Never mind.” Then, “It’s Christmas,” he said, finally.
A chill that I hadn’t known I’d carried since Thanksgiving eased off, replaced by the warmth of Will’s words. He hadn’t wanted to be alone for Christmas; he’d wanted to be with me.
“I didn’t want you to be alone,” he said. And warmth of a different kind filled me. William wanting me was one thing. William wanting me to have him? That was everything.
“William, I—” The words lodged in my throat like too many people through the same doorway, and I fell silent. I had spoken extemporaneously to international crowds in the thousands, tipsy; I had delivered speeches that would net the foundation hundreds of millions of dollars. I had delivered the eulogies at both my parents’ funerals.
But these words, in this conversation, would be the most important ones I’d ever uttered. Because they had the power lose or gain me William Fox.
Will’s eyes, skin beneath bruised from lack of sleep, lines around them visible in the morning sun, met mine hesitantly and before I knew what I was doing, I pressed my thumbs to those blue shadows, like I could erase the evidence of every moment of pain I had caused him, every scrap of unrest. I forced my tongue to unstick itself and my lips to part.
“I’m sorry,” I said simply. “I’m sorry, and you were right.”
William’s eyes went wide, and I wondered if he’d not anticipated I could admit when I was wrong.
“I saw a problem—something that was hurting you—and I only thought about how I could fix it. Not because I don’t think you can handle yourself. You’re the most competent person I’ve ever met. But because it made me feel good to fix it for you. Because I wanted you to be safe and happy. I didn’t think about the part where I didn’t ask you what you wanted.”
“Or the part where you used your considerable wealth and influence to game the system,” Will reminded me hotly.
“Or the part where I used my considerable wealth and influence to subtly influence the system,” I echoed. And was that just the hint of a smirk playing at the corners of his mouth?
I poured us both espresso, Will’s half-warm milk, and mine with a spoonful of sugar, and sat down at the kitchen table, setting Will’s drink across from me. If we were going to hash this out, we would do it here, face to face and within an arm’s length of the coffee maker.
“You get why that’s not okay now?” he asked.
“Look, William, you know me. You know my background and how I see the world, and I won’t patronize you by trying to tell you that I’m a different person than I was a month ago. This isn’t about what is or isn’t okay in terms of ethics. We know ours aren’t precisely aligned. This is about what we can demand of each other. What we need to trust each other. And I can promise you that I now fully get why what I did was a huge mistake because of what you think isn’t okay. And I will always respect what you need from me. I won’t use my powers for evil where you’re concerned again. I promise you.”
He did smile a little at that, though he tried to hide it in his espresso. “I, uh, I talked to Charlotte. Who pointed out that I might not have given enough credence to the idea that you really were trying to do something you thought was helpful for me. I get that you wanted to make my problem go away. But I care more about being able to solve my own problems than about them disappearing.”
“I understand that now.”
“Which isn’t to say that, upon reflection, I’m not glad that asshole’s gone. I think maybe…” He ran a fingertip along the rim of his cup, and shrugged. “I think I was mad at myself too. Because I was glad he was gone and I shouldn’t have been. I don’t want to be that person. The person who upholds the rules for everyone else but lets himself off the hook. It’s not…I can’t be that person. And that’s why you—” William locked eyes with me, and the confusion there was painful to see. “You fuck me up, Amory. You fuck me up, and I…I like it. And sometimes I worry that I don’t know how to stay me with how much I like it.”
I reached across the table and took both of his hands in mine. They were trembling.
“You are a deeply ethical person, William Fox. The fact that you can acknowledge conflict in yourself doesn’t make you less ethical. It makes you honest and brave. And the fact that you want to make sure you hold yourself to the same—Jesus holy Christ, the same soaring standards to which you hold the world?” I shook my head. “You amaze me. Your ethics may not be mine, but I can’t express how much I respect you for them.”
William flushed red and squeezed my hands, mouth opening and closing a few times before any words came out. “I don’t want you to change as a person. I…I love who you are. I just can’t be with someone who manipulates me.”
“I see that now,” I said. “I swear to you.”
“Okay,” he said, voice small. He didn’t quite meet my eyes.
“Okay?”
“Okay, I want us to…” He made a go on gesture and rolled his eyes. “Endure.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. “You want us to endure? Like our relationship is torture?”
He turned even redder. “You know what I mean.”
“You mean you want to be mine again,” I said, voice darkly teasing, “and for me to be yours.”
“Yes, if you must put it that way. And if we can agree that in the future, all problems will be handled together.”
“As a team,” I murmured. I liked the sound of that.
“Yeah. Also,” Will added, his face the very picture of a man who’d held off saying something for a long time. “Also, just please keep your promise about not stealing things, because I don’t think you’d do well in prison, and now I know how much being without you sucks.”
“Actually, I think I would do quite well in prison.”
Will’s eyes went huge, just as I’d intended.
“Joking, love.” Though, in fact, I did believe I was more suited to the psychological mind games inherent in the caste system of prison than most. But that wasn’t the point.
William glared.
“Do you want to know why I steal things?” I had never put it so baldly, and William froze. “Stole things, I should say. Not,” I clarified, “that I’ve done it often.”
He nodded.
“You’re not wearing a wire, are you?”
And, oh, how I had missed his smile while we were apart.
“The thrill of the steal is in changing the terms of the game. Breaking the rule that says what is someone else’s cannot be mine. It’s covetousness. Not of the object itself, but of the ability to remake the world. A painting hanging on a wall could be removed by anyone, but no one does. Not because of security but because of an acceptance of the rule that they cannot. But I can. I did. And in those moments, the art ceases to be art and becomes proof that the world can always change. That with the willingness to interrogate even the things that seem set in stone, fewer things are fixed than we might realize.”
Will was gaping at me like I was talking nonsense.
“I realize that you probably thought it was because someone who grew up with wealth would only want that which money could not buy, am I right?”
Will nodded reluctantly.
“No.” I cupped his face in my palms. “Do you know the other thing that feels like it dismantled all the rules? Feels like it has the power to prove to me that the world can always change?”
He was frozen. He shook his head, but I thought that he did know.
“Love, William. Stealing your heart feels like the greatest theft I have ever perpetrated.”
Will was half laughing, half sobbing, and definitely glaring at me in the process. Also smiling. His face couldn’t decide what it wanted to do. And I loved all of it.
I loved William Fox like the rip of lightning through a sky I thought would always be dark. Like a shout echoed back to me from a great depth, rounded by distance and time, but still recognizable. Yes, like the most perfect of perfect thefts. The ones I would never admit to, never acknowledge. The ones where something called to me where before there was only silence and emptiness and here, here, here was the thing that would shine on it with beauty.
“You’re—I—How do you—What—” Will spluttered. “The things you say should be ridiculous, but I—”
He shook his head and then grabbed me, practically dragging me across the table so he could get at my mouth. When my hipbone hit the edge painfully, I pulled him up.
We kissed in a way we had never kissed before, because now we knew what it was to lose each other.
I craved Will’s mouth and his taste with a hunger that was part lust and part relief, and I could feel his echoing desire in the way his hands clutched at my shirt, tangled in my hair. We were trying to fuse ourselves together into a form that couldn’t be rent apart.
The living room was warm from the fire, so rather than move to a bedroom, I pushed Will down onto the rug and stripped his sweats off. Audrey was perched on the arm of the chair closest to the fire. She lifted her chin off her paws to glance at us when we entered the room, then ignored us.
“Tell me this isn’t really a bearskin rug, because if it is I can’t stand the irony of actually fucking here,” William said.
“Clearly you know nothing about animals,” I said with a bite to his neck. “This is a snow leopard.”
Will’s head snapped up. “Vaughn!” He sounded horrified. “Aren’t those endangered?”
I laughed, and buried my face in his neck again. I had missed this gullible, principled, rigid man so much.
“Oh, you’re joking,” he huffed.
I kissed him on the mouth, drinking in the taste of him, then moved back to his neck, kissing and biting until he shuddered. He rolled on top of me and pulled my pajamas off, flinging them carelessly, then immediately looking behind him to make sure they hadn’t landed too close to the fire. The pants had landed half on Audrey, but she didn’t seem to care. When William had ascertained we were safe from living room conflagration, he turned his attention to kindling a conflagration between us. His mouth and hands were everywhere, the ends of his carelessly growing-out hair trailing over my stomach, my thighs, my cock, as he moved over me.
“I need you, love,” I said as he kissed the sensitive inside of my thigh. “Show me how it can be between us. Show me we’ll be okay.”
They weren’t words I could have imagined ever saying to another soul. Reassurance wasn’t anything I’d ever needed or desired before. But now I wanted to know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that William was with me. That we could make something together. Love, a life, a future. All of it.
Will nodded, pupils blown, cheeks and chest flushed. “Stay where you are.”
“That works better with handcuffs, William.” I winked as he flushed even deeper. “And I think the word you’re looking for is freeze.”
“I’m not a cop, Vaughn,” he scoffed.
“Does that mean we can’t play cops and robbers anymore?”
It was probably too soon to be joking about that, but the teasing words had left my mouth before I realized what I was saying, and I cringed internally, blaming my erection, which had clearly drained all the blood from my brain. I shook my head to dismiss the shadow from between us.
“I didn’t mean that,” I said.
“I know.” Will bit his lip. “It’s good it’s a joke, maybe. Because it means that’s all over now. Stealing and manipulating.” His voice was uncertain, and I nodded, wanting to reassure him. “Vaughn,” he said, and he sounded scared.
“It is, you’re right. I made you a promise. And I intend to honor it.”
He nodded.
“Call me by my name,” I said softly.
“Amory.” It was a whisper in my ear, a kiss to my throat, a warm hand on my erection, the pleasure of the word and his body flaring to life. I moaned at it, and then he was on me, mouth on mine, hands everywhere, grinding our erections together so hard I slid across the rug.
“Can we fuck on this thing?” Will panted. “Not like the one in your apartment?”
I nodded and pulled him closer. “Yes, fuck me, William. Fuck me on this rug—which, for the record, is organic cotton, not fur. Fuck me just like this.”
He slicked his cock with his precome, eyelids fluttering at his touch, then he paused. “Do I need a condom?”
“No,” I said firmly. “No, of course not.”
I could see the relief in his eyes that I hadn’t been with anyone else, and I felt my own relief that even if I had, he would have wanted me regardless.
He slid inside me with nothing but spit and precome between us, and we both groaned at the intense friction. But everything about his body around me, inside me, felt right.
“Your hair, god,” he muttered as he slid out and thrust back inside me slowly.
He ran shaky fingers through my hair, which had spread out on the rug. As I relaxed around him, he started thrusting harder, and waves of pleasure spread through me. My swollen cock was trapped between us, but I ignored it, focusing on the trails of fire running from my ass to my belly to my erection. William sped up and slowed down, kissing my mouth and running his palms down my ribs, his breath heavy. Then he changed his angle and I seized around him in pleasure. He cried out, and his control snapped.
He grabbed my hips and started a series of deep, long thrusts that had me lust-drunk and breathless. Then he nailed my prostate with quick thrusts and my head went fuzzy, unable to focus on anything but William’s hands on my skin and William’s cock inside me.
“I love you,” I said. “I’ll always love you.”
He cried out and squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, god, yes,” he panted, and when he looked at me again, his eyes were wet. He leaned down to kiss me, and the friction of his firm stomach on my erection was too much.
“William, please, fuck!”
“I love you so much,” he gasped, then he grabbed my cock, his grip almost painful as he jerked my flesh and pumped into me. My orgasm was a blizzard, an avalanche, the crack of a cleaving iceberg. It was a raging fire. Sharp relief and hot pleasure crashed around me, obliterating everything. I came in Will’s hand, pulsing hotly between our bellies as every muscle clenched. Will groaned, bit my neck, and came, his peak a rush of heat deep inside me, as if he could blast away everything that wasn’t him, that wasn’t us.
His hips stuttered and he shuddered in pleasure against me. My skin was humming with the satisfaction of orgasm and of Will’s body splayed over mine where he’d collapsed. We lay like that for a few minutes before cleaning up, and sank back down on the sofa, pulling a blanket around us.
“It’s Christmas,” William said after a while.
I looked around at the house. We had no tree, no lights, no decorations. No food, even, unless you counted things that came in boxes and cans, which I certainly did not. I didn’t even have a gift for William. It wasn’t how Christmas should be. Especially our first Christmas.
“I’m so sorry, love,” I said. “Sorry I don’t have anything. I can sort it out though, I promise. I can call the property manager, and order us more groceries, and maybe even get a tree delivered. We can—”
William silenced me with a hand over my mouth.
“First of all, stop it, because you’re not calling some poor guy to do your bidding on Christmas because he’s probably celebrating Christmas. Besides, the stores aren’t open—seriously, have you ever had to live in the world? Second of all, that’s not what I meant. I was actually going to say we should watch Gremlins because it’s the best Christmas movie.”
I quirked a doubtful eyebrow at this evaluation, but Will continued.
“I don’t care about any of that stuff, anyway. I just want to be here with you. And the cat. I was…really scared, Amory.”
I knew William would never admit to that kind of fear lightly, and I kissed his cheek. “I was too.”
We sat together for a while, looking at the fire and the quiet world outside. As new snow began to fall, Audrey tried to bat at it through the window before losing interest and curling up again in front of the fire.
“I don’t even have a present for you,” I said regretfully. It was hard to get William to accept anything he didn’t strictly need, and Christmas would have been one of the few times he might have done so gracefully.
“Me neither,” he said. “I was going to get Charlie to help me brainstorm at Thanksgiving, but…”
I made a dismissive noise. “You don’t have to get me anything.”
Will turned to face me. “I know,” he said. “You don’t have to get me anything either. You know that isn’t how this works, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I’m going to take care of you too, Amory. You don’t have to be so…alone anymore. Neither of us do.”
William’s words resounded in my head like an echo chamber.
If he’d asked me to, I’d have found a way to get him everything. I’d have braved the snowy roads into town, tried every store until I found one that would open for me, and returned with my hands full of a Christmas that I could give to him, spread out before him and offer him like it was pieces of myself.
But this was William. That wasn’t what he wanted. What he needed. He didn’t want to be given anything. He wanted us to share.
“I know what I want for Christmas,” I said, my voice cracking in a very un-Vaughn-like way. “What I want for us for Christmas.”
“What?”
William twined our fingers together on his knee.
I chose my words carefully, not wanting to mess this up with implications he might bristle at. I wanted to make it perfect.
“I want us to be together. To live together. To share everything, to…” How had he put it? “I want us to take care of each other.”
Will’s eyes widened, then softened, then narrowed in suspicion. God, he was so beautifully, achingly easy to read.
“You’re not buying some monstrously expensive mansion for us, so don’t think for a second—”
“William, I already have a monstrously expensive mansion. And I would love if maybe you might consider that your home too, on the weekends. But I know you need to be near work. I thought we could find an apartment together. In whatever neighborhood you want. Whatever’s most convenient.”
He bit his lip the way he did when he wanted something he wasn’t sure he should want. To eat all the homemade candy on Halloween. To role-play arresting me. To love me.
“Okay, but we have to contribute the same amount to rent.”
“Well, real estate is such a good investment, and—”
He shook his head. “No. I thought we were taking care of each other.”
I thought about it. How to express to William how little the money meant to me. But, ah, it meant more to him.
“I think,” I said, “that we each bring different things to this partnership. You would let Charlotte plan a party for you, since she enjoys it and has the skills to do so, wouldn’t you?”
Will nodded.
“And Charlotte would allow you to investigate a theft that occurred at the party, would she not?”
He nodded again.
“And you wouldn’t consider it an unequal partnership. From each according to her ability, to each according to her needs.”
He shook his head at me. “Are you seriously quoting Marx to me right now?”
“Marx was an extremely adroit thinker.”
“Yes, I’m sure the Vaughn Foundation billions were built on the principles of communism.” Will snorted.
“You laugh, my dear, but I make money in order to give it away. And, all right, to attempt to buy an apartment for myself and my partner, if he’ll let me.”
Will rolled his eyes, but leaned into me.
“Negotiations over?”
Suddenly serious, Will said, “You know that I would love you if you had nothing, don’t you?”
My heart stuttered. I did know, but hearing it filled me with peace. “And you know that I would divest every dime if it meant I could keep you, don’t you?”
We kissed, clinging to each other, then broke apart, both nodding.
“Is that a yes?” I asked, at the same time William said, “Okay, let’s do it.”
We laughed, giddy as children, as the fire cast our joined shadow against the wall.