Boston was really fucking bleak at the end of December.

Usually the view from his top-floor office made Drew McMann smile, regardless of the season. He was high enough above the city that he didn’t see the slush and grime in the winter or smell the baked-in oily fumes that clung to the pavement all summer. From up here, he could pretend the whole city was the glittering harbor, stretching out in endless blue all the way past the horizon.

But not today.

Today, it was all endlessly grey and depressing as hell, but it suited his mood. There was something about the period between Christmas and New Year that always made him feel this way - a kind of lame-duck suspended animation. It was too late to change the mistakes of the past year, and too soon to make the changes he knew he needed to make for the coming year, so for this one week, he would wallow.

“Boss?”

Drew turned in his chair to find his assistant, Peter, looking down at him, one immaculate eyebrow raised and his tablet propped against his arm. “Hmm?”

“I asked if you were fine with pushing back the Tekko meeting until next week, for Paula’s sake.”

“Paula?” Drew repeated, his mind as heavy and blank as the clouds outside.

“Paula Drake?” Peter gave a perfectly-calibrated sigh, just forceful enough to rebuke Drew without being overtly disrespectful. Peter was a master at sighing. “Have you even heard a word I’ve said?”

Drew ran a hand down his tie and grimaced. He hadn’t. Not a single word. Zoning out at the office was one of his pet-peeves, generally speaking, and it pissed him off that it had been happening to him more and more often. People tasked with running a multi-national company like Seaver Tech didn’t have time for daydreaming and navel-gazing. It was the kind of behavior Drew had given other people shit for in the not-so-distant past - his friend Cam Seaver, in particular.

He was pretty glad Cam had been too busy to pop in on him much over the past few weeks.

“Sorry, Peter,” he said, sliding his legs under the desk and looking up at his assistant. “Continue. Please.”

Five-and-a-half feet tall and lean-framed, Peter wasn’t intimidating physically, but he didn’t need to be. He could communicate displeasure with a raised eyebrow more effectively than Drew could in a paragraph of text. He was fiercely loyal to Drew, and one of the few assistants he’d ever had who could counteract Drew’s frequent habit of micromanaging. But Peter was way too professional to ever sit around and chit-chat.

Which made it all the more bizarre when, after observing Drew for half a minute, Peter sat down in the chair across from Drew’s, folded his hands atop the tablet on his lap, and narrowed his dark brown eyes.

“What’s going on with you these days?”

Well. That was a loaded question. Drew could start with the plane crash a year and a half ago that had killed three people he loved, though that was old news. His parents’ subsequent divorce and his dad’s retreat to Thailand with a woman younger than Drew was also well-known. Hmmm… He could mention how his mother, God love her, had no concept of money other than how to spend it, and needed Drew to handle her life for her, but that sounded too self-pitying. He could talk about the horror of learning Emmett Shaw - one of his father’s oldest friends and a man Drew had thought of as an uncle - had financed the plane crash, or the absolute mind-fuck of finding out that Shaw had been acting on the orders of some Russian crime syndicate no one had ever heard of, but both those things were secrets that could get someone killed.

Or, he could talk about what was really bothering him these days: that his best friend Sebastian had stopped talking to him.

Except that was just too pathetic to discuss.

He grabbed a heavy pen off his desk, running his fingers over the textured satin finish, feeling the comforting heft of it in his hand. “Not a thing is going on,” he told Peter finally. “Nothing at all.”

Peter clearly didn’t believe him, but he was far too professional to do more than give a small head-shake before returning his gaze to his tablet.

“Well, then, as I said,” Peter continued with the air of a long-suffering martyr, and Drew felt his lips twitch, despite himself. “Paula Drake’s mother fell and broke her hip, so we should probably push back the Tekko meeting until next week, unless you feel the burning need to get yourself up to speed and handle it yourself, in which case I can ask…”

“No. God, no,” Drew said, waving a hand through the air. “Wait for Paula. In fact, let’s see if we can push it back to the fifth or even later. Give her some breathing room.”

Peter nodded and made a note on his tablet. “Done. Ah, Margaret stopped by earlier and mentioned getting a couple of emails from a guy who used to work with Levi Seaver back in the day. Looks like he needs a job or a recommendation? I’m having her forward me copies of the emails.”

“A job inquiry?” Drew asked. “Shouldn’t that be an HR thing?”

“The guy says he was a close friend, and he’s been pretty insistent. She didn’t want to push it off without checking.”

“Margaret is Cam and Sebastian’s assistant,” Drew pointed out unnecessarily. “If they’re the ones getting the emails, shouldn’t she check with one of them?”

“Yeah, but Cam’s been crazy busy for the past couple of weeks and hasn’t had time to check into it. And Sebastian, well. I guess he hasn’t been checking his email.” Peter shrugged, once again managing to convey volumes in a single gesture.

Drew rubbed a hand over his forehead and nodded, understanding all that Peter was too diplomatic to mention.

Sebastian Seaver was a genius - with all the wonderful and really, really terrible things that entailed. He thrived on logic, but hated rules. Was single-minded in his focus to the exclusion of all other things, but somehow made intuitive leaps in a heartbeat. He was stubborn as hell, and the funniest, most generous human being Drew had ever known.

He had been Drew’s best friend since infancy. His sister Amy’s fiancé, before her death in the crash. The one constant force in his life.

And he was the only man Drew had ever loved.

He sighed. “Let Margaret know I’ll handle it.”

Peter nodded. “Last thing on the list is the Macauley case. Katrina handled the depositions last week. You’ll find everything on the drive. But Turner is handing out Federal subpoenas like candy, so I’m pretty sure there’ll be another round.”

Drew rubbed the spot between his eyebrows where a headache was starting to brew. Never a good sign this early in the day. “Get Devi on it, too,” he instructed. “He needs the practice, and Crista’s going out on maternity leave in February, so it’s time to bring him up to speed.”

Peter nodded at his tablet again, and Drew tapped his pen on the desktop impatiently. “I have a bunch of HR stuff to work on today - personnel requests and employee reviews.”

“Thought the reviews were due to HR before Christmas,” Peter countered. Drew pursed his lips and pretended to make a note on the pad in front of him.

“Mr. Kelley. Consistently. Challenges. Authority,” he said aloud, and Peter snorted but didn’t move from his seat.

“Something else?” Drew asked, nodding toward the tablet, and Peter hesitated, but nodded.

“You got an email from a Mark Charbonnier.”

Charbonnier… the name was vaguely familiar, but Drew couldn’t place it. He shrugged as he pulled the top file from the short stack at the side of his desk. “Is he from one of those charity things my mother contributes to? She’s in Martinique through the New Year, so they’ll have to wait for a donation.”

“Not a charity, a man. Apparently he met you at The Station back in November,” Peter said blandly.

Drew’s eyes flew to Peter’s, a clash of brown on brown, and he felt an unaccustomed blush climb his cheeks.

The Station was an upscale gay bar not far from Union Square. It was, as its name implied, not a place where you’d want to linger, but a quick stopping point between loneliness and a fast fuck. The kind of place Drew generally avoided, except when he was desperately trying to gain a little perspective on the stupid, juvenile, ridiculous brush of lips that had turned his mind inside out on Halloween.

Spoiler: it hadn’t worked.

Drew could barely remember the guy who’d approached him that evening - couldn’t recall his features well enough to make a police sketch. Had they even exchanged numbers? Had Drew really been distracted and foolish enough to give the guy his full name? God.

“What the hell is he emailing you for?”

Peter gaze was implacable. “You likely told him your name and where you worked, and he looked up your email address in the business directory so he could ask you out to dinner. Sounds pretty resourceful and dedicated.”

Ugh. Or desperate and stalkerish. Drew opened the file in front of him. “I have no idea who he is. Tell him thanks, but no thanks.”

For once, Peter remained still, making no move to note anything in his tablet of doom.

“Or forward the email to me and I’ll handle it,” Drew sighed. It wasn’t fair to ask his assistant to clean up his personal messes, after all.

“I have no problem taking care of it. But I’m wondering if… Don’t kill me, but there was a picture with the email.”

Drew blinked and looked up. “A picture?”

“The guy is quite good-looking,” Peter continued matter-of-factly, though his own face burned scarlet. “Like…” He cleared his throat. “Well, if I’m being frank, he’s hot as hell.”

Drew threw his pen down on the desk and leaned back in his chair. “Oh?” he drawled, reluctantly amused.

Peter nodded, clearly beyond all propriety now. “Insanely so. Hot enough that I forwarded the picture to my boyfriend, who confirmed it.”

“Thoughtful of you to undertake independent confirmation,” Drew said wryly.

“How long have I worked here?” Peter demanded, sitting forward, his serious eyes locked on Drew. “Never mind, I’ll tell you. It’s been over a year. And in all that time, while I’ve been keeping your schedule, do you know how many guys you’ve dated for any length of time? One: Cam Seaver. And even I knew that was some kind of crazy grief-induced interlude.”

Drew bristled. After the crash, it had seemed oddly right and normal to him that he and Cam, his best friend’s brother, would turn to each other. Comfort each other. Cam had just lost his parents, the same way Drew had lost Amy. And Sebastian… well, Sebastian had checked-out on both of them for a long while.

But Cam had realized how wrong they were for each other long before Drew had - Drew’s need to protect and comfort had driven Cam batshit, and the word control freak had been tossed back and forth more than once. All in all, Drew was happy that Cam had found his boyfriend Cort, and that their friendship had survived intact, but he didn’t appreciate being reminded of his mistakes.

“Your point, Peter? Assuming you have one.” The hard, cold voice his friend Cain called Drew’s “lawyer voice” was as comfortable as a second skin.

“My point is that I’m concerned about you. I get it’s not my place to say anything, which is why I’ve kept quiet,” Peter said in a rush. “I get that you’re gonna be all pissy about this. I’m very, very aware. But I like you enough to share this truth with you anyway, which really should count for something when you’re writing my review.” He cleared his throat, and Drew rolled his eyes. “You spend way too much time working. And when you’re not here, you’re generally making sure Sebastian Seaver is okay or helping your mother with her charity things. Do you know that you escorted her to seventy-three charity dinners or galas last year? Seventy. Three.”

Drew pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth to keep from laughing at the outrage in Peter’s voice. “Did you know that figure off the top of your head?”

“Of course not! I prepared notes. Would you like to see them?”

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary.” Drew held up a restraining hand when it seemed like Peter would run back to his desk to retrieve them.

“Right, well. You deserve more. You’re young, you’re cute… I mean, in a boring way that does nothing for me at all,” Peter assured him.

Drew couldn’t hold back his snort. “Right. Good to know.”

“Dark, puppy dog eyes, perfect brown hair, tall, great shape,” Peter said, ticking Drew’s attributes off like he was making a list on his infernal tablet. “Impeccable career, really intelligent, funny, patient with employees who overstep boundaries…”

“You hope.”

“Oh, I really do,” Peter said fervently. “My point is, you deserve to have fun. This Mark guy is cute. And as the keeper of your schedule, I know for a fact that you have a light week this week for social obligations. Maybe meet the guy for coffee. Talk. See where it goes.”

Drew cleared his throat, looked into Peter’s concerned eyes, and nodded once. “Your opinion is noted. I’ll consider it.”

“Excellent! I’ll hold off on replying for a couple of days then while you ponder. And, uh, I’ll grab you some lunch in a minute too.” He smiled the winning smile of a man whose performance review was about to be written, then stood abruptly and strode toward the door, likely before Drew could change his mind.

The second the door closed behind him, Drew dropped his calm mask and stood up to pace, more agitated than he’d been in a long time. Drew wasn’t angry at Peter, though. Far from it. He was angry at himself.

Angry because, one stupid summer half a lifetime ago, his stubborn heart had decided his straight best friend was the only man for him.

Angry because, despite all the years since then, all the men he’d dated, and the men he’d slept with, he’d never found anyone who made him feel half as strong and vital and necessary, even in the throes of orgasm, as Sebastian did while they were playing video games on his couch.

Angry because loving Bas was beyond logic and out of his control, leading him to whisper drunken truths that should never have seen the light of day and fucked up the best friendship he’d ever had.

Angry because, despite all of that, he knew he wouldn’t be following up with Mark from The Station, no matter how hot and successful and perfect he was, because he wasn’t Sebastian Seaver.

Leaning his head against the cold glass of the window, Drew closed his eyes. There were days he would give anything to wake up and not have Bas be the first thing on his mind - the blue of his eyes, the tilt of his smile. Desperate times, like those first days after Bas and Amy had started dating, when he’d wanted to move somewhere, anywhere, and forcibly eject Bas from his thoughts.

But the practical part of him knew that whatever heartbreak he suffered was simply the opportunity cost for having Sebastian Seaver as his best friend.

Drew couldn’t recall a season of his life when Bas hadn’t fascinated and challenged and encouraged him on a fundamental level. Bas had sat next to him on the sofa when Drew came out to his parents, tutored him in math and computer science all through college, rescued him from dates gone bad, insisted that he couldn’t run Seaver Tech without Drew at his side. And in exchange, Drew had been his confidant, his mouthpiece, the Alfred to his Batman, always making sure that Bas had what he needed while he focused on his work.

Every day of their lives, Bas and his crazy genius brain had made Drew think bigger, dream bigger. And now, thirty-something years after they’d first played together as babies, Sebastian Seaver had burrowed into Drew’s skin, changed his goddamn DNA.

He wasn’t sure how to move on from that.

He wasn’t sure he wanted to.

Drew’s problem wasn’t finding the right someone to fall in love with; it was that he’d already fallen for the perfect person - and he kept falling, over and over and over again.

He turned and leaned against the window, back to the clouds, and ran a hand through his short hair, fully aware that it would flop neatly back into place as though it had never been rumpled. Inconstancy had never been Drew’s problem.

A knock on the door startled him, and he glanced guiltily at the untouched reports on his desk.

Christ. He was taking navel-gazing to a whole new level.

“Come in, Peter,” he called, sitting down once again.

But when the door opened, it wasn’t Peter’s head that appeared.

“I snuck past when Peter wasn’t looking. Got a sec?” Cam asked, light blue eyes serious.

“Always,” Drew replied, summoning what he hoped was a genuine-looking smile. “What can I do for you, fearless leader?”

Cam smirked as he plopped himself down in the seat before Drew’s desk. “Question for you.”

Drew was used to seeing Camden Seaver as young. Maybe it was because he’d always trailed after Drew and Bas like a puppy back in the day, or maybe it was because his cheeks were still dusted with freckles and his hair a mess of cowlicks, despite his twenty-six years. Even when they’d dated, he’d felt the nagging need to protect Cam from everything. But now, madly in love with his boyfriend Cort, and confident in his job as second-in-command to Sebastian at Seaver Tech, Cam had blossomed into someone Drew saw as an equal… and a really good friend.

“Sure,” Drew told him. “Shoot.”

“When was the last time you talked to Bas?”

Drew sighed. Maybe he should have foreseen this. He and Sebastian had been joined at the hip for years, and now things had changed. It was crazy to think everyone wouldn’t have noticed.

Things had grown tense between them ever since that stupid high school reunion Halloween party where Drew had admitted he’d wanted Bas to kiss him for a long time. Their barbs had grown more heated, their friendly get-togethers had become cold-war standoffs, and over the past month, Bas cut Drew out of his life completely.

No more video game nights at Bas’s place, no lunch breaks, no Pats games on Drew’s sofa. Not a single word spoken since November. No text messages in weeks, even at Christmas. (And yeah, Drew had checked. Rather obsessively.) Being without his best friend was like losing a limb. And all because he’d lost control one stupid time.

And the worst part was, hurt and angry as he was, he couldn’t even blame Bas entirely. Drew had been hiding his feelings for years. And he’d known Sebastian would pull this shit if Drew didn’t force him to talk so he could brush it all off as a drunken misunderstanding. But he’d been too embarrassed. And then it had been too late.

A hell of a way for their friendship to die, if that’s what was happening. Ironic, honestly. It wouldn’t be the heartbreak of Bas’s engagement to Drew’s sister that tore them apart, nor the trauma of the plane crash, but a stupid kiss that would never have happened if Drew had remained in control.

But the last thing he wanted was to cause more tension among their friends by discussing this shit with Cam.

“Hard to say,” Drew hedged. “We’re both busy. At least, I assume he’s been busy. I know I’ve been busy. Spending the holidays with my mother and her friends is enough to drive a person to drink.”

“Speaking of which!” Cam said, pointing an accusing finger at Drew. “Since when do you not spend Christmas Eve with us? That’s been a tradition since before I was born.”

Drew shrugged. “Eh. Things change, Cammy.” He waited for Cam to react to the hated childhood nickname, but beyond a slight eyeroll, he remained impassive. “You’ve got Cort now, and he’s got his own family, with Damon and Cain and Damon’s long-lost sister…What’s her name again?”

“Chelsea,” Cam supplied. “And Chelsea’s daughter Molly. But none of that matters, idiot! We didn’t see any of them for Christmas. The three of us sat around having a Fast and Furious marathon. At least until Bas managed to drink himself into a stupor.” Cam rolled his eyes. “But even if we had seen them, it wouldn’t have made up for not having you there.”

“That’s…well. Thank you,” Drew said, unexpectedly touched by Cam’s words. “But my mother wanted to spend the holiday with her sister and some friends in New York, so we went down there for a long weekend. And now I’m busy writing the reviews I should have been working on.” He gestured from the pen in his hand to the open file on his desk. “So…”

But Cam refused to take the hint. Instead he sat back in his seat and regarded Drew with amusement.

“Your deflection skills are amazing, McMann, but not nearly as potent as my stubbornness skills. Recall that I live with Kendrick Cortland, the man Sebastian says is like Sherlock Holmes and a golden retriever all rolled into one.”

Drew snorted. Spot-on. Drew had warmed up to Cort quite a bit over the past few months, but it was insanely off-putting that the man always looked like he was laughing at a joke no one else could understand.

“You and Bas have been dancing around each other for weeks now. Why?” Cam persisted.

“I’m telling you, there’s no dancing,” Drew lied. There was so much dancing. Fred-and-Ginger-level dancing. “I’m not his keeper, Cam.” The lies kept rolling off his tongue. “We’re just… at a phase in our friendship where we need a little more time apart.”

Cam snickered. “Wow. That was epic bullshit, McMann. First of all, you kinda are his keeper. Who got him to leave his apartment when he was totally off the rails with grief after the crash? Who tells him when it’s time to leave the computer and join the three-dimensional people again? I don’t know if he remembers to eat if you’re not around.”

Drew looked away uncomfortably. This was true. And just one of the many things Drew had been worrying about over the past month. But when Bas so clearly wanted nothing to do with him, what was Drew supposed to do?

“Plus, there’s no way you’d tolerate a phase where you couldn’t keep an eye on Bas when he was so fucked up over this Russian bullshit,” Cam said triumphantly.

Aaaand there was the other thing Drew was worried about.

About a month ago, right around Thanksgiving because life was ironic that way, their friend Cain Shaw had been searching for evidence to prove that his father, Senator Emmett Shaw, had been the mastermind behind the Seavers’ plane crash. Instead, he’d found evidence that Emmett Shaw and Levi Seaver had taken money from a Russian criminal organization called SILA to found Seaver Tech, and SILA had been blackmailing them for years. The group, led by a psychopath named Alexei Stornovich, had threatened to harm the entire Shaw family if Senator Shaw didn’t arrange to have Levi Seaver killed.

Now, instead of finding closure for everyone involved, they’d been given an even bigger, scarier monster to bring down. A bigger, scarier problem for Bas to obsess over, likely making risky decisions in his anger.

Drew was pretty sure Bas hadn’t spent any time in his official, executive office across the hall in weeks, which meant that he was either working from home or holed up in his private computer lab down in the basement of Seaver Tech, either working on an actual, billable Seaver Tech project, or plotting some brilliant-but-crazy scheme to get revenge on the Russian criminals. Who the hell knew?

It would be as easy as checking his keycard access to see where he’d been spending his time, but once again, Drew resisted.

“I love that you think I can control Bas when he’s got an idea in his head,” he said, instead. “If he feels like he needs space, there’s nothing I can do to change his mind.”

“Once again, I call bullshit. You can always break through. And I’m worried about him, Drew. Really worried. His spiraling isn’t healthy.”

Drew sighed and met Cam’s eyes. “I haven’t talked to him since November.”

“I knew there was something brewing the last time we met. You were both so pissy.” Cam got quiet for a second. “But that long?”

“Yep. He even sends his work-related communications through Margaret,” Drew confirmed.

“What the hell did you two fight about?”

Drew chuckled, once. He had no intention of sharing the particulars with Cam, but… “We didn’t fight. We never do. Bas just… disappears.”

Cam sighed. “He misses you.”

“Really? Odd, because here I am!” Drew waved a hand in the air above his head. “In my office. With my working phone.” He lifted his cell off the desk and gestured with it. “Not avoiding calls or texts. So he could stop missing me anytime he wanted.”

Cam ignored Drew’s rant. “At Christmas, he kept hoping you’d show up. He sat in the living room with us, but he kept checking the door and looking at his phone. He was like a sad little island off to one side who refused to interact except to ask for another drink. And he was drinking vodka, Drew. You know he only drinks the hard stuff when he’s seriously upset.”

A pulse of guilt made his stomach churn, and Drew hated it. Hated that he felt responsible when he hadn’t been the one to pull away… and hated that Sebastian was unhappy without Drew to help him through it, even as a friend.

“Then why didn’t he call?” Drew demanded, but even as he said the words, he knew the answer.

Cam raised one eyebrow, and Drew nodded, rolling his eyes.

“He’s so fucking stubborn,” Drew said.

“He is. And it’s more than that, you know it. He doesn’t always have the easiest time understanding where people are coming from. You think it’s obvious that he could have called you at any time, but maybe he just didn’t know how to begin!”

“I’ll think about it,” Drew said, rolling his eyes at himself. He’d given Peter pretty much the same answer about Mark.

“Good. Because we need to put all of this stuff aside and figure out how we’re going to handle SILA.”

“Has something new happened?” Drew asked, frowning.

“Not that I know of. It’s just… I feel like we’ve been sitting around waiting for the other shoe to drop. Last time we met at your house after Thanksgiving, Cain said his father had warned Alexei that he wasn’t to come after us.”

“Right,” Drew agreed. “That he had plenty of info on SILA and wouldn’t hesitate to turn it over to the authorities if Alexei made a move against us.”

“Yeah, but do you really think that’s going to hold him off for long?” Cam demanded. “Do you really think SILA isn’t planning a way to get around that? Or just plain threatening to kill the Shaw family if Senator Shaw doesn’t fall back in line? How long can we trust our safety to Emmett Shaw?”

“We can’t. We always knew it was a temporary peace,” Drew said, tapping his pen on the desk.

“Right. And for Bas, it wasn’t even that. He’s so damn guilty, like it was his fault they all died since it was his engagement we were all going to celebrate, that he’s probably working round the clock on this. And I’m worried he’s going to get careless.”

“Bas doesn’t do careless,” Drew said, but he couldn’t deny that his own worry was kicking up several notches at Cam’s words.

“Fine, not careless. Risky. Something that might alert Alexei that we aren’t just sitting around waiting for them to get bored and come at us.”

Drew nodded. It was distinctly possible.

“We all need be on the same page.” Cam ran a hand through his hair, his blue eyes troubled. “And we need to end this once and for all. There’s a horrible cloud looming over all of us, and we’re waiting for the storm to unleash. It’s no way to live a life, when you can’t plan your future more than a couple of weeks in advance. I have this man by my side who’s more amazing than I ever could have imagined. I want to plan a life for us, and I don’t want to waste another single day worrying about criminals and conspiracies. I want dogs and kids Cort can spoil and protect. I want Bas to start working on AI so he can finally build a woman who can put up with his moody bullshit.”

Drew laughed.

“And I want you to meet some hot guy who gets hard from listening to NPR like you seem to,” Cam continued with a grin. “Someone you can lean on and build a life with, where your primary job isn’t worrying about Bas and the rest of us. I want us all to move on, together, and to do that, we have to work together to get past all the stuff that’s keeping us in suspended animation.”

Suspended animation. Just like this depressing week between week in between holidays. Just like the past fifteen years of wanting a man who could never love him.

And whoa. Those words hit him like a blow to the solar plexus.

He wanted that future Cam had painted. The nice, hot guy, the kids and the dog. Life was short - the past year or so had proven that with gut-twisting clarity - and he’d spent half of his trapped like one of those insects in amber, waiting for a man who couldn’t love him.

It wasn’t that Drew hadn’t proven his love enough. It wasn’t that Drew hadn’t made enough effort or sacrificed enough of his life. It was that Bas… wasn’t gay.

He. Wasn’t. Gay.

One mind-blowing kiss in October didn’t change that, and neither would the passage of time or the power of Drew’s love.

He’d let their friendship expand to fill the empty places inside him, and had started to expect things subconsciously. Like that Bas would finally change his mind or fall in love with Drew? He wanted to deny the idea even to himself, but he couldn’t. God, what an idiot he was.

But maybe… maybe somehow… he could find a way to change things for both of them.

“I’ll talk to him,” Drew said. “I’ll head down to his dungeon in a bit, and I’ll invite him to a meeting at my house where we can all get together and talk about this. Let’s say, Saturday morning.” Drew took out his phone to make a note. “Or we could do afternoon. Check with the guys.”

“Are you going to make pumpkin muffins?”

Drew lifted his head in surprise. His eyes met Cam’s, which had lost their serious cast now that he was confident Drew would handle Bas, sparkling blue in the overhead light. “Pumpkin’s so last month. Double-chocolate says New Year.”

“Martha Stewart McMann.” Cam stood to leave, a smirk on his face. “Who would’ve thought. How come you never made baked goods for me when we were dating?”

“My inner baker was still evolving,” Drew said drily. “All for the best really. You’d never have broken things off if you’d gotten a taste of the chocolate muffins, and then where would Cortland be?”

Cam grinned hugely and leaned over to ruffle Drew’s hair, completely unaffected by Drew’s single raised eyebrow. “I’ll tell Cort you were worried about him,” he said with a wink, then sobered. “And, hey. Good luck with Bas. His mind is a dark and wacky place, but whatever bullshit he’s spiraling about, remember he loves you.”

Drew raised his chin in acknowledgment, but he sat staring at his office door long after Cam had closed it behind him, thinking not about how to stop Sebastian’s fixations, but how to cure his own.

He pressed the intercom button on his desk phone.

“Peter? Get me Mark’s email address. I think… I’d love to meet for coffee.”