Chapter Twelve

Julian 

Richard texted the next day again.

Richard: Still owe you that dinner if you are interested, no industry talks I promise. Just good food and an even better chat.

Julian read it three times before he set the phone face down on his desk, like putting a distance between himself and the screen might help him think more clearly. It didn't. He picked it up almost instantly.

He was supposed to be revising the surrender scene. Ethan’s note sat at the top of the page in tight red script:  “push the physical buttons further, I want the reader to feel his body reacting against his will”.  And Julian had been staring at that sentence for the better part of an hour without putting down a single new word. Every time he tried to describe a man losing his hold on himself, his brain kept circling back to a hotel room in Connecticut, to gray eyes going dark and then fleeing, to a text about a conference call sent at 6:20 in the morning like a coward slipping out a back door.

He was so damned tired of thinking about Ethan Cross.

The man hadn't even apologized for leaving him behind in Connecticut. That immediately infuriated him.

He was exhausted in a way that came from thinking of him anyway, over and over again, at his desk, in the shower, lying awake at 2 a.m., touching himself with the help of the memories of that unforgettable night, and also cataloguing every almost-moment like evidence to prove something to himself.

He responded to Richard’s invitation.

Julian: Tomorrow works, somewhere I don't need a blazer.

Richard's response came in almost immediately after he hit send.

Richard: I know a place, trust me.

He didn’t trust Richard. He didn’t trust anyone who owned a boat, and he was fairly certain Richard owned at least one. But that wasn’t really the point. The point was that Richard had looked at him across a dinner table in Connecticut, as if he were interesting rather than dangerous, had refilled his wine, laughed at his jokes, and asked him genuine questions about himself without making him feel inferior.

That was new. Julian wasn’t sure what to do with new.

He called Maya that night, phone wedged between his shoulder and his ear while he stood in front of his closet trying to remember which of his three good shirts he hadn’t already worn to a Cross Media House.

“You’re doing the thing again,” Maya said, before he’d even finished explaining.

“What thing?” he asked, rolling his eyes. 

“The thing where you talk yourself into something by listing all the reasons it’s a terrible idea until it sounds like a scheme.” A pause, the sound of her chewing something on the other end.

“Is this about the hot rich publisher from the trip?”

“Yes, Richard” 

“Richards are hot” she gushed.

“They are,” he confirmed.

A beat. “Okay listen love, have fun. Wear the black one, you look good in it and it makes you seem like you have your life together, which, though it may be, is a useful thing to project on a first date.”

“It’s not a first date.”

“Julian.”

“Fine. It might be a first date.” He chuckled. 

—

The restaurant was small and unmarked, tucked below street level in the West Village behind a natural brick porch, the kind of place that didn’t bother with a sign because everyone who mattered already knew where it was. Warm low light, the smell of garlic and browned butter, a hum of conversation just quiet enough to feel private. Richard was already seated when Julian arrived, and he stood to greet him with an easy, unhurried smile, as he had nowhere else in the world he’d rather be.

“You came.” He said it like he’d genuinely wondered.

“I said I would.”

“People say a lot of things they don’t mean.” Richard pulled out the chair across from him, which felt absurdly old-fashioned and, annoyingly, nice anyway. “I half expected Cross Media to have you chained to a desk.”

 Julian let himself smile at that remark as he sat, shrugging out of his jacket. “I’m not technically supposed to be socializing with distributors outside of business hours. Considering the current situation.”

“Ah, yes. The situation.” Richard poured wine into both their glasses without asking, an easy, practiced motion. “For what it’s worth, I don’t put much stock in gossip blogs. People believe what makes the best headline, not what’s true.”

“That’s generous of you.”

“I try to be generous with people I like.” He raised his glass slightly. “To enduring your first month of captivity,” he said smugly with a hint of a smirk.

Julian laughed and clinked his glass against Richard’s, and for a moment the knot in his chest loosened just a little. It was, he had to admit, easy. That was the strange part of it. Richard asked questions and then actually waited for the answers instead of using the pause to plan his next sentence. 

He asked about the manuscript, about the failed project before it, about the studio apartment Julian had been three days from losing before Cross Media’s offer landed in his inbox like a life raft.

Julian turned his glass slowly by the stem, watching the wine catch the candlelight. “I wrote it during the worst year of my life, the manuscript I mean, and if I’m honest, everything else had fallen apart, so I just… wrote the thing I was too scared to say out loud. I placed it online anonymously and forgot about it.” He shrugged like it was nothing, though it had never once felt like nothing. “Didn’t expect anyone to actually read it. I definitely didn’t expect it to become my entire life.”

“Sometimes the things we’re most afraid to say turn out to be the only things worth reading,” Richard said lightly, but his eyes weren’t light at all, watching Julian with an attention that felt like being seen rather than considered. “I’d like to read it. The whole thing, not just the pitch deck version.”

“It’s not finished.”

“Neither am I. We could be unfinished together.”

Julian laughed, surprised into it, and shook his head. “That is a genuinely terrible line.”

“I’ve been saving it. Did it work?”

“Unclear. Ask me again after dessert.”

By the time the check arrived, neither of them had made a move to leave, and Julian had almost managed to go a full hour without thinking about gray eyes and a locked office door. Almost.

“Come back to mine for a drink,” Richard said, settling the bill with  unhurried confidence. “No pressure though he said, hands raised.  “I make an excellent espresso martini and I want to show off a little bit also an even better excuse to keep the conversation going a little longer.” he finished with a twitch in his eyes.

Julian should have said no. He turned the word over, reflected upon it, felt the familiar warning rise up in the back of his throat, a caution that had nothing to do with reputations and everything to do with a lesson he’d learned a long time ago, in a different life, with a different powerful man who’d also made everything sound easy right up until it wasn’t.

He looked at Richard’s face, open and warm and utterly without agenda, and told the caution to wait outside.

“One drink,” he said.

—

Richard’s apartment was exactly what Julian had expected and somehow still managed to surprise him. Floor-to-ceiling windows, art that was probably not from a catalogue, a view of the Hudson River that made his own studio feel like a shoebox someone had forgotten to throw away. 

Richard made the promised espresso martini, and it was, infuriatingly, very good.

They ended up on the couch, closer than two drinks strictly required, Richard’s arm stretched along the back of the cushions, not quite touching Julian’s shoulders but close enough that the space between them felt charged. He was telling a story about a disastrous book fair in Germany, something about a keynote speaker and a fire alarm and Julian was laughing in the right places, genuinely laughing, when Richard’s hand found his knee.

It stayed there. Julian let it.

“You’re somewhere else,” Richard said eventually, not as an accusation, just an observation, quiet and unbothered.

“Don’t apologize.” Richard set his glass down on the low table and turned to face him more fully, close enough now that Julian could smell his cologne, clean, costly, and exotic. “Tell me to stop, and I will. Immediately”.

Julian didn’t tell him to stop.

The kiss, when it came, was slow and unhurried and skilled. Richard’s hand slid up along his thigh, slowly, and Julian kissed him back, chasing the newness of being wanted by someone who seemed entirely certain of what he wanted.

It should have worked. Julian kept waiting for it to work, for the moment to simply carry him along the way these moments were supposed to. 

Richard pulled back just far enough to murmur against his jaw, “There’s a very comfortable bed about twenty feet from here, if you're curious," and his hand drifted, and Julian’s whole body went suddenly, completely still.

“Wait.” The word came out rougher than he meant it to. Julian eased back, putting a few inches of space between them, pressing the heel of his hand briefly against his eyes. “Sorry. I need to just… wait a second.”

Richard went still immediately, hands lifting slightly, “Hey. It’s fine. Take whatever second you need.”

Julian sat with the quiet for a moment, breathing, letting his heartbeat settle. He reached for something true enough to say out loud without having to explain all of it.

“I don’t think I’m actually ready for this,” he said finally. “Any of this. I thought I was tonight, and I’m realizing halfway through that I’m not, and that’s not fair to you.”

Richard studied him for a long moment, and Julian braced for annoyance, for the skillful disappointment of a man used to getting what he wanted. It didn’t come. Richard just nodded slowly, something almost rueful  in his expression, and settled back against the couch cushions, putting a comfortable, deliberate distance between them.

“Okay,” he said simply.

“Okay?”

“Okay.” Richard picked his drink back up, unbothered, like the moment had cost him nothing at all, which, Julian suspected, it genuinely hadn’t. Men like Richard did not run short on options. “For what it’s worth, I’d rather have an honest no than a polite yes.

Julian huffed out something between a laugh and a breath of relief.

Richard smiled, easy again, the tension dissolving out of the room like it had never been there. “Can I say one thing, and then I promise to change the subject and call you a cab?”

“Go ahead.”

“Figure out what you actually want before you let anyone talk you into anything, including me.

You strike me as someone who’s spent a lot of his life doing what other people needed. Do yourself a favor and don’t let tonight be one more example of that.”

It landed closer to the truth than Julian was prepared for, and he had to look away for a second, out at the dark water beyond the window, before he trusted his voice again. “Noted,” he said finally.

“Good.” Richard stood, offering him a hand up with the same easy grace he did everything with. “I’ll call you a car. And Julian, that dinner offer stands whenever you actually want it,  no agenda. I like your company. Turns out that’s enough for me.”

“That’s a very low bar.” he huffed.

It’s an extremely high bar, actually. Richard let out, cracking up.

—

The cab ride was easy. Julian felt strange. Slightly embarrassed too. Richard could have been a good fuck, taking his mind off a certain someone. But Richard’s voice kept repeating those words in his mind.

Figure out what you actually want first.

Fine. He could do that.

He was going to do that.