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If you want a lover
I'll do anything you ask me to
And if you want another kind of love
I'll wear a mask for youIf you want a partner, take my hand
Or if you wanna strike me down in anger
Here I stand
I'm your man— Leonard Cohen
YOUR DEVOTION HAS THE LOOK OF A LUNATIC SPORT.
— Barbara Kruger
Before Ronan was released from the institution, his counselor strongly urged him to try doing something with his life.
She made suggestions, which Ronan thought were all stupid, and offered words of encouragement, which Ronan thought were all useless. The problem was not that Ronan had never been given ideas for ways to spend his future, or told that he was capable of making use of his life. The problem was that Ronan didn’t want to. His life, in the literal sense, was the reason he’d been committed in the first place. It had occurred to him at the ripe old age of twenty-eight that he’d been given a life and would have to wait patiently until it was over. As a result, he’d eagerly attempted to expedite that deadline, to no avail. Spending three months in a mental hospital had only embittered him further—the staff had no choice but to keep him alive, and therefore, Ronan had no choice but to go on living.
He was a difficult patient. He wasn’t interested in doing anything, and he wasn’t really qualified to do anything, either. Ronan’s father was dead, and his inheritance was large. Ronan had no reason to work. Ronan had no reason to do anything he didn’t want to do. Instead of approaching his second chance at life with zeal and gratitude, Ronan went through the motions of complying with his treatment plan. He took his meds as directed, when directed. He saw several therapists, sometimes more than once a day. He enjoyed yard time and tolerated game night. He also grew a beard, because they wouldn’t allow him to have a razor.
For months he moped around in his pajamas since he could not have a belt or shoes with laces or pants with drawstrings or clothing with straps. The fact he was forced to grow out his hair drove him crazy—the sensory nightmare of the beard was only further compounded by the fact they wouldn’t let him keep up with his signature buzzcut. He was antsy all the time, uncomfortable, forcibly separated from everything that made him feel like himself. To add further insult to injury, Ronan had nearly killed himself by accident. He hadn’t really been trying to make such a dramatic exit. His protests had fallen on deaf ears. A day of suicide watch in the emergency room quickly became a 72-hour psych hold which resulted in a recommendation for an inpatient stay. Ronan had little say in the matter—suicide was a crime, and the hospital staff were determined he would do his time.
When his discharge date began to loom, he was placed on a transitional plan. That plan was no different from his regular treatment plan, with one exception: he had to see an additional counselor. The transitional guidance counselor arranged interviews for him, all for low paying entry level jobs that would entertain the notion of hiring someone without a high school diploma. Ronan didn’t plan to attend any of them. His care team most likely knew he fully intended to blow them all off. Despite the fact everyone involved was aware of the fact they were wasting their time, Ronan was still required to attend the counseling session, and the counselor was still required to provide counseling.
“Most people,” she said, “have more success after discharge if they find something to do with their time.”
“Must be nice,” was Ronan’s flippant response.
She wasn’t impressed by that answer, but there was nothing else she could do; he’d already been medically cleared for release. The staff seemed to be more excited for Ronan’s departure than he was. They referred to his discharge as going home, though it wasn’t truly, because Ronan wasn’t going home. He was going to his brother Declan’s house.
In the days before Ronan’s discharge, he began to dread the prospect of the ride home in Declan’s shiny, practical, hideous car. A condition of his parole was that he rely on his support group in the coming months, which was doctor speak for move in with family so they can make sure you don’t try to off yourself again. For the next year, as a result of their strongly worded recommendation, Ronan would be forcibly cloistered in the guest bedroom of his brother Declan’s townhouse. It was a grim fate; Ronan hated DC, and he wasn’t all that fond of Declan, either.
The facility granted him his conditional freedom on a gray and dreary day, much like most of the days that had come before it. Ronan wasn’t sure what day of the week it was when they let him out. There were no clocks and no calendars inside; time passed as a shapeless crawl, lending a further sense of alienation and unreality to the experience of being hospitalized. Ronan held his folder full of discharge papers to his chest defensively, in case anyone tried to stop him on his way out the door. He jogged through the rain, brimming with a fragile kind of excitement; he was happy to be free.
Declan’s shiny silver Volvo idled by the curb, headlights and windshield wipers on, its pristine metallic body dappled with raindrops. While he would’ve normally recoiled at the sight of it, Ronan couldn’t help but be glad that someone had finally come to take him away. No doubt he could expect to receive a lengthy lecture from his brother. He knew he looked a mess: his head and his face were normally clean shaven, and they’d discharged him in the clothes he’d arrived in, which were the same clothes he’d tried to kill himself in, although they had been laundered in the interim. More than anything, he was looking forward to having some privacy. For three months he had not showered alone, eaten alone, or slept alone. Declan was likely to function as a gleeful and watchful eye of the law as long as Ronan was under his roof, but he at least would not follow Ronan into the bathroom.
Ronan slammed the door as he got in the car, just to watch Declan’s forehead wrinkle with annoyance. It did. His face tightened, and a frown twisted his mouth into an ugly, tight shape.
“Christ, you look like John in the wilderness,” Declan muttered. “Didn’t you have any other clothes?”
“Nope,” Ronan dragged a hand through the long, dense curls on his head. “Did you miss me?”
Declan’s nostrils flared. He didn’t respond. He looked away from Ronan, and focused instead on the road. They drove for some time. Nothing but the patter of rain and the rhythmic thump of the windshield wipers underscored the silence. Ronan couldn’t see much of the city through the rain; it was like a heavy curtain had been drawn over everything. Declan’s house was just as quiet, with all the curtains closed and the lights off.
It was unoccupied, aside from the two of them. The third and youngest Lynch brother, Matthew, was doing a semester abroad. It was chilly, artificially cold like a refrigerator. All the furniture was neutral, gray and white and light blue, like a showroom or a model home. Ronan didn’t like it. He remembered what the townhouse had looked like before Declan inherited it, and he missed the busy wallpaper and antique furniture. Declan had the opposite of a Midas touch: whatever he had a hand in, he made worse.
“Your stuff’s in the guest room,” Declan said. “I’ll bring you a razor.”
The emphasized impermanence of Ronan’s place in the house didn’t go unnoticed. Not your room but the guest room. This was not Ronan’s home, and it would never be; Declan would not allow it to be. For now it was a holding area, a place for Ronan to sequester himself while he tried to remember how to be a person. He wasn’t optimistic about the timeline for that particular project. Ronan had been pretty bad at being a person before his stint in inpatient, and he wasn’t convinced he would be any better at it now.
Declan brought him a shaving kit with an electric razor in a black zipper bag, and he stood in the hall outside the dimly lit guest bathroom while Ronan shaved his head and his face. He wouldn’t give him a bladed razor. They fought about it, viciously, loudly, at great length. Ronan preferred a close skin shave, which he couldn’t get with an electric razor; Declan preferred Ronan with his forearms intact and his hall carpet unstained. In the end, Declan came out victorious. He took the shaving kit away when Ronan was finished, and then finally, blessedly, he left Ronan alone.
It took Ronan a few minutes of mind-numbing silence to realize that it was weird to be by himself. He hadn’t initially thought he’d have any trouble acclimating to it. He’d been alone before, after all, most of the time. It should have been like returning to baseline. He wouldn’t have to eat his meals off trays, he would be able to keep all the laces in his shoes, he wouldn’t have to make his bed every morning, and he would be alone. He had no friends in the hospital, and he had no friends in Declan’s house. The natural order had been restored. The only option remaining was to deal with it.
Three days later, a Monday, Ronan was permitted to use a real razor with a real blade.
He should’ve known it was a trick. He should’ve been able to guess that there was an ulterior motive. He had spent the better part of his time trying to talk Declan into taking him home to pick up his car. Ronan’s charcoal gray BMW was at Ronan’s white farmhouse in the valley, hours from DC. He missed it; he missed all of it. To have his car back would only serve to further humanize him—reliable transportation was one of the basic requirements for a high quality of life. Ronan had pleaded that facet of his case quite expertly, and at long last, Declan had acquiesced.
Once he was shaved, and in clean clothes, and in the front seat of Declan’s car, Ronan realized that the agreement had been conditional. When Declan passed the exit that would’ve taken them to the on ramp that would’ve taken them to Ronan’s home, he realized he had been double-crossed.
“Where are we going?” Ronan demanded.
“You have an interview,” Declan said.
Ronan couldn’t help but laugh: one short, stunned bark of incredulous laughter.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” he asked. “You’re kidnapping me right now, jerkwad.”
Declan rolled his eyes. “You got in this car of your own volition.”
Ronan started to swear, long and involved, furiously enough to peel paint off walls. He invoked every nasty, hateful word he could think of in order to tell Declan exactly what he thought of the situation he was currently in. Declan, true to fashion, ignored it. Halfway through the tirade, he leaned over, and opened the glovebox. Inside of it was a manila envelope. He handed it to Ronan, and then he sat back in his seat. All of this he did without saying a single word, or even really glancing in Ronan’s direction.
When Ronan had made his feelings known, and fully exhausted himself in the process, he ripped open the envelope. Inside of it was a resume someone had written up for him. It was unimaginative and bland, but professional looking. His name was the biggest, at the top in all caps, like a marquee: RONAN LYNCH. He wondered if this was done on purpose; his qualifications and experience were sparse, and wouldn’t have filled an entire page on their own. The language used to describe his career thus far was perfunctory and vague. He couldn’t imagine that it would impress any prospective employer, whatsoever. Ronan did not have a high school diploma. Ronan’s head was freshly shaved and his jeans were artfully distressed. Ronan had multiple visible tattoos. Ronan had relatively fresh scar tissue on the insides of his forearms, woven like a ladder along the tributary of his veins. Ronan had a juvenile criminal record. He was, perhaps, the least employable person who happened to still be somewhat alive, despite his best efforts to the contrary.
Along with the resume was a cover letter, just as brief and proper as the resume. Along with that was a job listing, photocopied from the Classifieds section in a newspaper.
SECRETARY WANTED — for Attorney’s office. Typing experience a must. Knowledge of Latin language preferred. Serious applicants only.
Someone had underlined Latin language in red pen, and someone else had circled the entire ad in blue pen. Ronan couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“This is a joke, right?” Ronan demanded. “You can’t be serious. A goddamn secretary? Me?”
He could tell that he was shouting; his volume increased in tandem with his fury. Declan winced, and then he scowled, as if Ronan was being completely unreasonable. As if Ronan had no right to be upset by the fact that his lack of qualifications and his inability to look good in a pencil skirt were about to be subject to scrutiny. He didn’t need a job. He didn’t want a job. Declan liked to throw his weight around, but this was too much for Ronan to bear. He wanted to hit something. Preferably Declan. Preferably more than once.
“They specifically want someone who can read and write Latin,” Declan said.
“I wish I’d actually wanted to die last year,” Ronan told him, a note of hysteria in his voice. “I wish I’d been serious about it. I wish I’d really committed to the bit and fucking killed myself.”
“Okay,” Declan said. “I don’t know why you’re so upset. They probably won’t hire you, anyway. What’s important is that you try.”
Ronan knew that. The lasting consequences of his most catastrophic failure had been impressed upon him at length during his time in the hospital. He could never enlist or be drafted into the military. He could never receive a donor organ. He could not legally own a gun in several states. He could not apply to be a foster parent. He would likely never be prescribed opioids by any legitimate healthcare practitioner. None of those results were all that detrimental in the grand scheme of things; the puckered scar tissue on his forearms, which still sometimes ached when he twisted his wrist at just the right angle, had proven to be more of an inconvenience thus far than the permanent red flag on his medical record.
He kept his silence, though tempestuous, until Declan pulled up in front of a gray brick office building. In the front yard, close to the sidewalk, a large lawn stake sign read HELP WANTED. It was an angry looking sign, all red capital letters, swaying wildly in the relentless wind.
“Go on,” Declan said through gritted teeth. “If you go through with it, we’ll go get your car.”
“I don’t fucking believe you,” Ronan snapped. He unbuckled himself, and climbed out of the car. “And I will never fucking forgive you.”
Declan lifted his eyes to the heavens, but his view was impeded by the ceiling of his car. Ronan slammed the passenger door so hard the chassis rocked. Rain pelted his shoulders, slapping the leather of his jacket in spiteful cadence. He flipped Declan off through the tinted window, and then he turned and stalked up the path towards the front entrance. The first thing he noticed was the lack of sound on the other side of the door. It was like a tomb, cavernous and quiet. His footfalls echoed hollowly down a hall as he made his way to the reception area.
It was a sleek, modern office, with ash wood floors and cool gray walls. The furniture was dark, all sharp corners, clearly expensive. A clock ticked loudly, echoing in the vacuous, frigid room. In the middle of the reception area was a desk, and behind the desk was a girl. She was crying, sniffling in a woebegone, pathetic way. Every so often she would pause in her rapid-fire typing to dab at her eyes with the sleeve of her shirt. The clacking of her keyboard was jarring—any sort of sound seemed wrong, a rude and unnecessary disruption of the sterile atmosphere. The bulky computer monitor hid most of her small frame from view; she was a slight thing, blonde in a limpid way, wearing an unflattering polka dot blouse. When the girl noticed Ronan, she sat up straight and sniffled again.
“Good morning,” she said. “May I help you?”
“I’m here for the interview,” Ronan said.
Her tepid eyes lit up when he mentioned the nature of his visit.
“Oh!” she said, suddenly elated. “Oh, thank God. I’ve been waiting. You can go right in. His office is at the end of the hall. What took you so long? The temp agency’s been promising me they’d get me out of here for weeks.”
She spoke as quickly as she typed. Ronan took a step back, recoiling from the patter of her voice and the incessant sniffling that punctuated her speech.
“Just down there.” She pointed to Ronan’s left. “Please. He’s expecting you. I’ll be out in a jiffy. Thank you so much, really, you have no idea.”
“Okay, whatever,” Ronan said—her schedule and her gratitude meant nothing at all to him. “Who’s expecting me?”
“I’ll tell him you’re coming,” she said. “Please, go in. Please.”
Ronan glanced over his left shoulder. There was another long hallway, this one dimly lit and just as minimally decorated. At the end of this particular hall was a stately looking wood door. On the door, a gilded plaque read ADAM PARRISH, ESQ. and below that, in smaller letters, ATTORNEY AT LAW. The entire building made Ronan feel on edge, like trouble was looming; walking down the hall towards the large door felt a little like being sent to the principal’s office. That only served to worsen his mood—he’d spent a large portion of his academic career loitering in the hall outside a door emblazoned HEADMASTER, aware of the fact that he was about to receive another tiresome verbal dressing down regarding his wasted potential.
When Ronan reached the end of the hallway, he knocked, once. Within seconds, the door opened to reveal Adam Parrish, Esquire, Attorney at Law. He was well dressed, tall and slender, with piercing blue eyes set deep in a handsome, angular face. His forehead was furrowed in a perturbed manner that made his fair eyebrows look like one long pale, blonde line. He had not one single hair out of place anywhere on his head, nor a wrinkle in his neatly tailored suit. He had dark circles underneath his eyes, and a few faded freckles dappled the bridge of his nose. Despite those two very human and almost boyish physical attributes, there was an innate peculiarity to his demeanor. He looked uptight, just like his office. He looked annoyed, just like Ronan.
Adam Parrish frowned at Ronan, and then he said, “I’m sorry. I don’t take criminal defense cases.”
Rage and humiliation simmered in Ronan’s stomach. In a gruff, unkind voice, he replied, “That’s funny. Really fucking funny. I’m not here to hire you. The opposite, actually.”
“I don’t understand,” Adam said.
Ronan held up the manila envelope with his resume inside. “I’m here for the interview.”
Adam’s eyes widened slightly, almost imperceptibly, for nothing more than a split second. He was caught off guard. Ronan delighted in that. He had the upper hand, for the time being—the element of surprise was on his side. Without a word, he handed Adam the envelope.
“Interesting,” Adam said. “Come in.”
He stepped aside to allow Ronan into his office. The interior of that room was different from the rest, decorated with dark wood and heavy, masculine furniture. What really held Ronan’s attention was the enormous tabletop terrarium that occupied nearly the entire back wall. Inside, dozens of plants grew on poles, from pots, along trellises, up the glass walls. Everything was lush and green and well cared for, leaves and petals alike dripping with water and gently lit by a warming lamp. Ronan had never seen anything like it; the fact Adam had taken time to have such a thing installed in his office was surprising. He wondered why the personalization stopped at the doorway and didn’t continue into the reception area.
Adam closed the door to his office, and pointed to the leather sofa positioned in front of the terrarium. “Sit.”
Ronan sat.
The wall opposite the terrarium was nothing but bookshelves, stuffed full of leather bound tomes. In front of that stood a stately wooden desk with ornately carved panels that went all the way to the floor. Adam sat down in his leather desk chair and surveyed Ronan from across the room. The gulf between them was odd, yet purposeful. Ronan could tell when he was being tested.
“Why are you interested in this position?” Adam asked.
“I’m not,” Ronan said.
Adam blinked. “Okay. Then what brings you to my office?”
As far as Ronan was concerned, honesty was the best policy. He knew that it likely wouldn’t take much to ruin any and every chance he might have at securing a job. If the hair and the tattoos and the overall demeanor didn’t do it, then the embarrassingly scant nature of his resume would.
In a mild voice, he said, “They just let me out of the looney bin, and this is part of my reintegration.”
“Oh,” Adam said. He looked a little perplexed. “Would you care to tell me why you were in a facility?”
“I’m a danger to myself,” Ronan replied. “And allegedly also a danger to others.”
“Well,” Adam said. “That doesn’t necessarily disqualify you.”
Ronan noticed that Adam hadn’t opened the envelope to look at his resume. He could only assume that was a bad sign. While he waited for Adam’s next question, he cast his gaze around the room. Multiple degrees hung on the wall closest to the door, all bearing the name STANFORD and the name ADAM PARRISH. Ronan noted the absence of a wedding ring on Adam’s hand; he noted the absence of family photos, wedding photos, any kind of photos at all. He got the impression that someone had carefully curated the decor with an audience in mind—it would be difficult to learn more about Adam than he wanted you to know.
“The ideal candidate for this position would have a proficiency in the Latin language,” Adam said. “Would you say you meet that qualification? I don’t have time to teach vocabulary lessons.”
“Oh, sure,” Ronan said. “You know what they say about men with large vocabularies. Ostende mihi tuum et ostendam tibi meum?”
Adam cleared his throat. And then, to Ronan’s immense surprise and disappointment, he asked, “When can you start?”
“Well, that depends,” Ronan said. “Once I start, when can I stop?”
Not even the ghost of a smile flickered over Adam’s face. His light lashes flicked with tightly reined irritation, and then he stood. Silence settled as he shuffled through a few pieces of paper on his desk. Ronan could see the effort he was putting into choosing his words; he appreciated that Adam was at least going to reject him politely.
Without looking up, Adam said, “You can start Monday. The office opens at eight.”
It was a shocking turn of events. He didn’t know how rejections of this nature usually went, so he hadn’t known what to expect, but it was definitely not that. A resounding you’re hired! after a few scarce minutes of cagey chitchat surely would not suffice to thoroughly determine his veracity as an employee. Ronan wasn’t sure if he should say thank you, or if he should try for a handshake, or if he should bolt for the door. He had never interviewed for a job before, nor had he ever been offered one. He was totally out of his depth.
Adam seemed to recognize Ronan’s helplessness; he glanced up, quirking one of his fair eyebrows. He didn’t look amused or condescending, though he had every reason in the world to be. It was possible he had realized that Ronan was waiting for instructions; it was possible he enjoyed watching people twist in the wind. He searched Ronan’s face for a moment, and then he said, “I’ll see you Monday.”
The dismissal was clear. Ronan exhaled slowly through his nose as rose from his seat and made for the door. The hallway from Adam’s office to the reception desk and the hallway from the lobby to the front door seemed to stretch on for miles. Outside, it had started to rain in earnest. Declan’s car awaited him; Ronan paused for a moment to sigh before he opened the door and folded himself into the passenger seat. He yanked on the door handle. It was locked. He offered Declan a middle finger through the tinted window. The next time he yanked, the door opened.
“How did it go?” Declan asked.
Ronan let the annoyance in Declan’s face build for just a few seconds, and then he headed it off at the pass with a phrase he was sure Declan never expected to hear come out of his mouth.
“I got the job,” Ronan said.
Declan looked dubious.
“I need my car,” Ronan said. “So I can drive myself here on Monday.”
“Okay,” Declan said. “We’ll get it.”
This time, when Declan said they were going to get Ronan’s car, he followed through on it. Ronan dozed in the passenger seat for the duration of their long haul out of DC. By the end of the afternoon, they had arrived in the tiny town nearest to the valley that hid Ronan’s acreage. The white farmhouse he’d always called home was a sight for sore eyes, rising out of the fog like a palace shrouded with morning mist. Ronan’s shiny charcoal gray BMW was in the driveway where he’d last parked it. Fallen leaves covered the hood; weeds had begun to sprout around the tires. Ronan had missed it like a limb. He barreled out of Declan’s accursed vehicle before it had even rolled to a stop.
He wanted to bolt and run, to shutter himself inside and lock the front door of the house to keep Declan out. That wasn’t likely to happen. Ronan had conditions to meet before he would be allowed to come home. He wondered if they’d send someone to clean up all the blood in the bathroom. Knowing Declan, they probably had. Knowing Declan, every square inch of the house had been scoured in order to remove all traces of Ronan’s little accident. It killed him that he couldn’t even go inside and look to see if they’d raided all of his stashes. Declan stood quietly, hanging halfway out of his car, with the door open.
“I fucking hate this, man,” Ronan said.
“I know,” Declan said. “I don’t like it, either.”
“You could let me stay,” Ronan said.
Declan had the decency to sound sad when he said, “You know I can’t do that, Ronan.”
Ronan sighed. He got into his car. He let his feet rest on the pedals as he held the steering wheel in a loose grip. With another long, weary, heaving exhale, Ronan turned the key in the ignition. He pulled out of the driveway first, while Declan trailed closely behind. They made the drive back to DC in tandem, never more than a safe braking distance apart from each other. The windshield wipers kept time as Ronan stared resolutely out the windshield at the gray sky and the gray asphalt and the gray hood of his car. His eyes smarted, like he might cry. The sensation endured for miles. In the end, he did not cry. He didn’t see the point in it.
He did, however, maintain his stormy silence for the rest of the night.
“It’s not me you’re mad at, Ronan,” Declan said while Ronan glared at him from the other side of the dinner table.
“Yeah, it is,” Ronan replied.
Declan didn’t look up from the NYT crossword to respond. He let Ronan be angry. It wasn’t anything new or unusual, so it didn’t warrant that much concern.
In truth, Ronan was angry at everyone and everything. He was upset with Declan for being alive, himself for the same reason, and his father for being dead. He was mad at the weather for being terrible, the walls of the guest bedroom for being a dull, pea soup green color, and the fact gas was $3.99 a gallon. Ronan’s resting pulse was a steady simmer of fury. He bubbled over often, as a habit, as a guarantee. It became harder and harder for him to find any catharsis in it, but he was so used to feeling it, he couldn’t be sure he would ever feel any other way. Nothing helped. Nothing scratched the itch.
It filled him with dread to know he had no choice except to wait it out. He knew from experience that an emptiness wouldn’t fill itself—it would only ever get bigger. Ronan worried it was too late for him; he worried that there would never be anyone in the world courageous or substantial enough to try and close the gap. It was hard to imagine anyone finding Ronan worth the effort.
The hideous bedding in the guest bedroom matched the garish walls. Ronan threw the bedspread onto the floor and curled up beneath the sheets. He closed his eyes, and he hoped he wouldn’t dream.
After only a week of regular attendance, Ronan developed a reputation at his local MMA gym for being an exceptionally good loser. This was not because he held himself to any high standard of sportsmanship, nor was it because he engaged in routs for the thrill of it. Ronan was perfectly capable of winning fights. It was just much more painful to lose them.
There were only a few places Ronan could go in order to get punched in the face by men of an equal weight class to himself. One of them was Declan’s house; the other was the gym. He’d been given access to his bank account on the day of his release, and so far, he’d only spent money on gas and his gym membership. It was amazing how much money a person could save when they weren’t actively dependent upon many expensive substances. While Ronan abstained from the hard stuff, he indulged in other risky pastimes to fill the void. He was bruised more often than not—his face, his knees, his shins, his sides, anywhere a punch or kick might land during a routine sparring session.
In addition to his notoriety at the gym, Ronan had quickly proven himself to be a terrible secretary. This discovery did not come as a surprise to Ronan. It did, however, serve as a great inconvenience to Adam.
Ronan arrived over an hour late to his first shift. He hadn’t intended to go at all, but Adam’s terrible decision-making skills had compelled him to find the place his motivation stemmed from. In Ronan’s experience, one of the best ways to learn a man’s true nature was to piss him off. Much to his delight, Adam was tight-lipped with fury when Ronan finally arrived, with butterfly bandages on his nose and left eyebrow. Adam tapped the toe of his right foot with irritation while he waited for Ronan to take a seat at the receptionist’s desk.
“What happened?” Adam asked testily.
“I lost a fight,” Ronan said.
“I can see that,” Adam replied. “I would prefer you didn’t come in here looking like that if you’re going to be dealing with my clients. It looks like we’re running a fight club out of the file room.”
“Whatever,” Ronan said.
It was clear that Adam was on some kind of power trip, and Ronan figured that all he needed to do was wait for him to get it out of his system. He was probably the kind of boss who got off on reminding the subordinate staff that they were beneath him. Ronan had never allowed anyone to make him feel inferior, and he didn’t plan to start anytime soon. It would take much more than a frosty reprimand to make him truly sorry for his behavior. Adam set a sheaf of paper on the desk in front of Ronan. The front page read EMPLOYEE HANDBOOK, and stuck to the front page was a Post-It note that read ATTN: RONAN.
“Familiarize yourself with that,” Adam said. “I will only take client meetings four days a week, between the hours of noon and four. It is your job to schedule these meetings, and to ensure the clients arrive on time. On Mondays, no one is allowed in my office. If someone calls or walks in, tell them I am not here. If I end up in court, you will be given an adapted schedule that accommodates my absences. Got it?”
Ronan offered him a small mock salute, and a sarcastic, “Yes, sir.”
Adam turned on the heel of his shiny, shiny shoe, and went into his office. To Ronan’s surprise, he closed the door gently behind himself.
The first thing Ronan decided to do on company time was snoop. He opened a drawer and dumped the employee handbook into it without reading a single page. Then he rummaged through the other drawers and poked through the assorted items on the desk. The previous secretary had been very organized; Adam’s color-coded schedule was blocked down to the minute, with not a wasted afternoon to be found for the next four months. All of his current cases were assigned their own color of folder, which corresponded to the color of ink used to note the appointment on the calendar.
An enormous clock hung on the wall behind him, ticking away the seconds at a cacophonous volume. All-in-all, the room was austere, devoid of creature comforts or personal touches. It reminded Ronan a little of Declan’s house: designed for people to look at, not intended for anyone to live in. It was a room that gave off a distinct impression.
Ronan spun on his desk chair in lazy circles for a few minutes. When he got bored of that, he tapped the enter key until the ancient desktop computer woke up. He busied himself with rifling through all the old folders, reading client correspondence, skimming Adam’s case notes, scoffing at the fact the paralegal wrote all of her notes in red ink. The computer tower hummed, buffeting warm air against the side of Ronan’s face as it struggled to keep up with his rapid clicking.
The phone rang. Ronan ignored it. He double-clicked on a folder labeled PROBLEM CLIENTS and scrolled through endless pages of memos and briefs and cease and desists. Some of the reasons for firing a client were amusing, like client removed shoes in court and was cited for contempt or client referred to A. Parrish as a ‘heinous cunt’. Others were not at all funny, and a few crossed the line into worrisome. Adam had been threatened with countersuits, guns, knives, the mafia, suffering at the hands of everyone’s son and uncle and brother, and more. Bricks and rocks and lit fireworks had been thrown through the front windows. Graffiti had been left on his car, on the sidewalk, on the front door of his home. Adam had worked with a bevy of nutcases, and kept stringent records on all of them.
What Ronan found most entertaining of all were Adam’s case notes. A lot of it was clearly dictated to a secretary, but there were a few acerbic phrases that he identified right away as belonging to Adam. He had to have been boiling with fury when he’d written in short, the plaintiff’s petition contradicts common sense. The phone rang again. Ronan ignored it. Leaning into the monitor made his head hurt. He pressed two fingers into his temple and closed his eyes for a moment. He briefly wondered if he might be hungover, and then dismissed the thought; he hadn’t been drunk or high since the day he went into treatment.
The third time the phone rang, the intercom on the edge of Ronan’s desk also buzzed. A neatly printed label on the front told him it was AP’S OFFICE buzzing in.
Ronan flicked the switch, and said, “What?”
“You’re supposed to answer the phone when it rings,” Adam said.
“I don’t want to,” Ronan said.
“You have to,” Adam said. “It’s your job.”
“Whatever, man.”
The next time the intercom buzzed, Ronan didn’t flip the switch to respond. The next time the phone rang, Ronan answered it. It was an old-fashioned, clunky phone with way too many buttons Ronan was never going to use and a long, curly cord that twisted itself helplessly into knots he was never going to untangle.
“What do you want?” he said.
“Pardon?” came the perplexed inquiry on the other end of the line. “Sorry, is this Adam Parrish’s office? I might have the wrong number.”
“Yeah, you probably do,” Ronan said, and then he slammed the phone back into the cradle.
They didn’t call back. Somehow, Ronan made it to the end of the day without getting anything of value done. The phone rang a few more times, but the intercom didn’t buzz again. Ronan left before Adam emerged from his office to deliver any feedback on his performance.
Several days passed like that. Ronan would arrive, sometimes very late, sometimes only a little late, sometimes with his knuckles taped, sometimes with dried blood under his nose or fingernails. Adam deposited a fresh copy of the employee handbook on Ronan’s desk every morning, with several passages highlighted and a passive aggressive Post-It note stuck to the front cover. Ronan never bothered with any of them. The bottom right drawer of his desk was nearly full of unread handbooks. The phone would ring at random, and Ronan would only answer it if the mood struck. Clients would walk in unannounced, without appointments, and Ronan would refuse to acknowledge them until they were forced to approach his desk and ask politely if Mr. Parrish was available.
“He’s not,” was always Ronan’s answer, and then he would make a big show of flipping through the color-coded desk calendar until he arrived at a far-off date some time in the next year. “He has limited availability next July. You can come back then.”
Through it all, Ronan marveled at Adam’s staunch refusal to admit he’d made a mistake in hiring Ronan. Any other employer in their right mind would have fired him on his first day. While it would be obvious to anyone who paid attention that Ronan possessed the mettle to perform a secretary’s job to a more than satisfactory degree, the rub lay in the fact that he refused to apply himself. The calendar stayed in order, mostly because Ronan liked having an excuse to turn people away. Adam had some incredibly needy clients, and Ronan had no patience for any of their bullshit. Few people made it past his desk and into Adam’s office.
Ronan was almost entirely left to his own devices. As a result, the filing system devolved into something that could only be described as chaotic. Folders spilled out of drawers, memos piled up in trash cans, and the motor on the paper shredder burned out halfway through his third shift. Adam made no comment about any of it. He simply continued to deliver the handbook, with his notes and comments included. Adam kept to himself. He took his job seriously, and he handled a good number of loyal, high- profile clients. The fact that he should be good at what he did wasn’t a surprise, but other things were. Adam’s behavior mystified him, in a way that made Ronan wish he was more closely acquainted with him.
The way Adam spoke to his clients and to his paralegal was habitually polite, while at times a little sarcastic. He did his best to appear frigid and business-like whenever possible, remote and detached in a way that artfully disguised his true nature. Ronan knew better. There was an entire drawer in one of the office filing cabinets dedicated to potential pro bono work, and dozens more file boxes in the record room full of cases that Adam had taken on without being offered a cent. For the most part, Adam settled estates and managed wealth and helped old people write wills. It was an odd line of business. The grander majority of his clients were either dead, close to dying, or had a family member who’d recently died. None of the doom and gloom ever seemed to bother him.
On the morning of Ronan’s third Wednesday shift, he went into Adam’s office. It was a rare thing for him to do; Ronan was hands-off as a rule, and Adam preferred to be left alone. Still, occasionally, curiosity or boredom got the better of him. Ronan dropped a stack of mail and a few client messages onto Adam’s desk, and asked, “Why do you do this?”
Adam looked up from his briefing, and lifted a pale eyebrow. “Do what?”
He was wearing a light blue suit and a crisp white shirt, both tailored to fit him like a second skin. His tie was silk, patterned with blue hydrangeas. It sometimes made Ronan angry to look at him. Adam owned, and regularly wore, one particular dark brown suit that made Ronan want to punch a wall whenever he saw him in it. He hated that he wanted to know Adam and that Adam wouldn’t let himself be known. He wanted a real, sincere answer to his question. He somehow already knew that he wasn’t going to get one.
“This.” Ronan gestured vaguely. “Doesn’t it bum you out? All the dead rich people?”
“No.” The corner of Adam’s mouth twitched, like he was at risk of smiling. “It doesn’t bum me out.”
With that, he’d looked back down at his paralegal’s red-pen notes, effectively dismissing Ronan without saying a word. After that brush-off, Ronan decided the only explanation could be that Adam was secretly some sort of freak. There was ugliness inside of him, Ronan knew it. He just couldn’t prove it. Adam was good at keeping it under wraps, whatever it was, despite Ronan’s best efforts to yank the tripwire and trigger a total meltdown. The buttoned-up diplomat bit had to be an act. Ronan had cracked tougher nuts—he would figure out what got Adam going, and then he’d exploit the hell out of it.
If Adam’s calendar was to be believed, he never took personal time and he never had lunch with friends and he never had any family member’s birthdays to celebrate and he never did anything other than work himself into a stupor every single day. Adam must have his reasons for living a life of solitude—it took a lot of effort to be so lonely. Ronan figured he was qualified to make that judgement. Not only did Ronan consider himself an authority on self-sabotage, he was also a leading expert in the field of self-imposed isolation. Adam kept everyone and everything at arm’s length with a ruthless and practiced efficiency that spoke to years of practice.
All that Ronan could look to for insight was the terrarium. There had to be something he could learn there, something that could be gleaned from observing the way that Adam cared for his indoor garden so fastidiously. He tended to the plants with a single-minded focus. The blinds behind them were opened and closed based on the time of day and amount of sunlight; browning leaves were trimmed; soil was loosened and oxygenated and tamped down again with precision and reverence; the built-in sprinklers went off periodically like misters in the produce aisle of a grocery store. Adam’s capacity for empathy extended only to things that were alive, but couldn’t talk; things that were alive, and needed him very badly, to the point they depended on him entirely for safekeeping. It fascinated Ronan. That was only one small peek behind the facade, yet it was enough to send his imagination into overdrive.
Trying to find out what made Adam tick was a game at first, but day by day, Ronan grew more intrigued by his potential depth. The way Adam gently caressed petals and leaves with the back of his fingers was a learned behavior—a tenderness that he showed only to the things in his care. It struck Ronan as ridiculous that he should be jealous of a plant, but he couldn’t help it; once he’d noticed the more appealing aspects of Adam’s personality, he couldn’t ignore them.
Realizing that Adam was perhaps a complex and layered person and not a soulless stuffed suit did nothing to improve Ronan’s work ethic. It did, however, keep him coming back to the office. If Adam noticed a change in his attendance, he didn’t remark on it; instead, he would highlight other choice passages from the handbooks he provided on a daily basis. So far he’d taken objection to Ronan’s wardrobe, people skills, filing methods, and overall demeanor. Despite that, Ronan kept his job, while Adam kept killing trees by offering Ronan the chance to change his mind about reading and adhering to company policy.
Outside of work, Ronan didn’t bother to keep himself busy. He took his meds every day, he shaved his head every day, and he ignored Declan’s pathetic attempts at disingenuous conversation every day. Every so often he would put gas in his car. Every so often he would idly daydream about dying, just like he had for most of his life. Boredom and dissatisfaction gnawed at his insides, at times leaving him in agony, distraught, alone in Declan’s guest room. Every morning he dragged himself out of bed. Every Sunday the two of them went to Mass. Declan did his best to act like nothing had changed. Ronan did his best to act like Declan was not around.
In a way, Ronan was glad to have the job. He had gotten used to a schedule in treatment, and he desperately needed to get away from Declan as much as possible. As long as Adam was willing to put up with Ronan’s weaponized inefficiencies, he would continue to clock in and beleaguer him with them.
After all, he truly had nothing better to do with his time.
Ronan had been Adam’s unwilling secretary for two months before he suffered any real consequences for his poor performance.
He’d spent the better of the day in a terrible mood. The fax machine had made noise all morning, beeping and thudding and devouring numerous reams of paper as someone’s entire 85 year medical history was sent over to their office for some unbeknownst reason. Ronan debated unplugging it from the wall, but that would require physically moving the enormous dinosaur of a machine. While he squinted at blurry copies of x-rays and doctor’s notes, the intercom buzzed.
“Ronan,” Adam said. “Come into my office.”
Ronan swore under his breath as he yanked another sheet of paper out of the fax machine and tossed it onto the top of his INCOMING stack. With ire steadily mounting, he stalked down the hall and threw open the door to Adam’s office.
“What?” he demanded.
“Come in,” Adam said.
He heaved a sigh and rolled his eyes, and then Ronan stepped into the office and slammed the door. He stood in front of Adam’s desk with his arms folded over his chest and one eyebrow cocked in an unspoken challenge. None of his bluster seemed to affect the even keel of Adam’s temperament. He was oddly calm, with a loose ease in his body and a blank look on his face.
“Do you think it’s appropriate to show up to work with a black eye?” Adam asked.
Ronan couldn’t be sure if the question was rhetorical or not. It was delivered in a patronizing tone of voice, domineering and slightly derisive; it made Ronan’s stomach twist with hot shame. He resented it immediately. His face throbbed beneath the bruise—it had been a forcefully thrown elbow, and his cheek was mottled purple from eyebrow to nostril.
“I don’t,” Adam continued. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t you and I already talked about this?
Ronan couldn’t correct him, because he wasn’t wrong.
“Would you care to explain yourself?” Adam asked.
Ronan shrugged. “Not really.”
“I’ll tell you what I think, then. You lost on purpose.” Adam said. It wasn’t a guess—he spoke it like fact, in a tone that didn’t seek confirmation. “You could’ve beat him, but you didn’t. The only thing I can’t figure out is your motive. Either you did it just to upset me, or you do this to seek some masochistic thrill. Which is it?”
Ronan’s face flushed. Flatly, he replied, “Both. What’s with the third degree?”
“Bend over the desk,” Adam said.
That was an unexpected turn of events. Of all the things Ronan had thought Adam might say, that was not one of them. It was clear from the look on Adam’s face that he was serious—a somewhat voracious expectancy simmered in his eyes.
“What?” Ronan asked.
Adam rose out of his chair. He opened one of his desk drawers to produce a single sheet of paper, which he slapped down on the desk in front of Ronan. The heading declared it to be the EMPLOYEE CODE OF CONDUCT. Several passages highlighted in blue. Ronan’s heart began to race.
“You heard me,” Adam said. “Bend over the desk.”
Slowly, without taking his eyes off of Adam’s face, Ronan bent at the waist and braced his weight on his elbows atop the cool, polished wood. His anticipation far outweighed his apprehension. He did his best to keep his head up and his expression neutral, though he knew the hot flush of embarrassment in his face had already given him away. Adam didn't hurry as he came out from behind the desk and went somewhere in the room behind Ronan, out of sight.
“Read that page to me out loud.” Adam directed. “I know you can do that, at least.”
Ronan took a deep, steadying breath. He heard the unmistakable sound of a belt being unbuckled. Trepidation kicked his pulse into gear. Something was going to happen; he wouldn’t know what until it did. He forced himself to focus on the task at hand and began reading at the top of the page.
“Employees shall, at all times—”
A loud, guttural gasp lodged itself in his throat when Adam brought the belt down against Ronan’s thighs. He was surprised, and then embarrassed, because he hadn’t expected it; he’d heard Adam unbuckle his belt, and his mind had gone in a completely different direction. Nobody had ever spanked Ronan—it had never occurred to him that someone eventually might. He was caught off guard by the sheer unlikelihood of his current predicament. In the heartbeats following, the humiliation that had arisen along with the reality of his situation didn’t dissipate; it grew stronger. Ronan knew that he could stand up and walk away. He could turn around and punch Adam in the face. He could call the cops, or an attorney, or the news, and have Adam’s practice closed and his reputation ruined.
After a split second of soul-searching, Ronan decided he didn’t want to do any of those things.
Instead, he wondered what it might be like to stand on the other side of his own body and watch the points of impact bloom with livid bruises.
The place where Adam had struck him burned. It hurt. He knew it wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been, because he still had his pants on; he knew it wasn’t as bad as it was going to be because there was no way Adam intended to stop at one. Ronan’s head hummed with static.
“I didn’t tell you to stop,” Adam said.
Even though there was a noticeable amount of threatening disapproval in Adam’s tone, it was another moment before Ronan was able to continue. He exhaled slowly through his nose, and lowered his weight further onto his elbows.
The code of conduct was brief, only a few succinct paragraphs. It took Ronan a long time to read it. Every time he reached the end of another clause, Adam would punctuate it with the belt. Ronan counted them off in his mind, noting each moment of emphasis.
“Employees must show integrity and professionalism, including in manner of dress and presentation,”—one—“Employees may not misuse company property or abuse company resources,”—two—“Employees should strive to be polite and collaborative,”—three—“receptive to feedback”—four—“and disciplinary action from their superiors when deemed necessary,”—five.
The loud snap of the leather was satisfying to the ear, although disruptive to the rest of Ronan’s body; it was difficult to focus on keeping his hips back and his head down and his mind on the words in front of him. It was a manageable amount of pain at first, nothing worse than he might endure while going a few rounds in the ring, but it began to mount, building to a point where he felt nearly hysterical with it. The terms and conditions of employment started to come out oddly shaped and guttural.
When he reached the end of the page, Ronan stopped. His ears were ringing, and he was panting, his mouth open, his forehead beaded with sweat. His final count had reached thirteen—thirteen direct violations of company policy that Adam decided to correct him for. Ronan wasn’t sure what to do. He didn’t know if it was over, if he was forgiven, or if Adam still had something else in mind.
“Pull down your pants,” Adam said.
Ronan didn’t stand up to obey; he lifted his shoulders to take his weight off of his arms, and reached back. With shaking hands, he fumbled with his belt and zipper. It wasn’t an easy task in his position, but he managed it. His jeans bunched around his knees, their fall impeded by the spread of his legs. A beat passed. Ronan lifted his head. In the polished glass doors of the bookcase in front of him, he could just barely make out Adam’s reflection. The wavering, gossamer mirror-image of Adam took a step forward, and reached out towards Ronan’s body. His touch was light and almost business-like as he pulled down Ronan’s boxers to join his jeans.
Gently, so gently that it made Ronan’s forearms pebble with goosebumps, Adam skated a palm over the inflamed skin of Ronan’s haunch. His breath hitched with a gasp; it was strange to be touched like that, stranger than being disciplined, stranger than being half-naked and close to tears in another man’s presence. Ronan understood violence, and he understood disappointment. The intimacy of this particular gesture confused him. That, he could not fathom. Adam heard the tiny hitch of his voice, and he looked up to catch his gaze in the glass.
“Read it again,” he ordered.
Ronan could hear how heavily Adam was breathing. The glacial displeasure was gone, replaced by something dark and laden with intent.
“I’m sorry,” Ronan said. He pressed down through his fingertips, blanching them white against the dark wood of the desk.
“I didn’t ask you to be sorry,” Adam said. “I told you to read it again.”
The steel in his voice sent a shiver down Ronan’s spine. He looked back down at the paper in front of him.
“The Employee Code of Conduct outlines standards—“
Ronan’s voice snagged in his throat when the belt came down again, directly against his skin in a red hot stripe. Tears welled in his eyes. Adam didn’t reprimand him for his silence, and he didn’t offer any mercy. When Ronan had at last gathered himself enough to continue, Adam hit him again. It wasn’t long before Ronan had lost count. The conduct policy seemed to stretch on for endless pages, nothing but paragraph after paragraph of simple rules that Ronan had repeatedly, and flagrantly, disregarded. He hiccuped with sobs. His hands were shaking; his legs were shaking.
When Ronan reached the end, Adam stopped. A gulf of silence followed that was almost as extreme as what had just taken place. Ronan had cried enough to leave shimmering droplets on the surface of the desk. He trembled like a flame. While he struggled to get his breathing under control, Ronan looked up to watch Adam put his belt back on. His face was florid, and his pupils were wide; Ronan could see the hard line of his cock running parallel to the zipper of his pants.
Adam appeared unaffected by the current state of his own body. With an unbothered lack of hesitancy, he pulled the leather through his belt loops and buckled it snugly. He ran a hand through his hair. He sat down. Ronan wasn’t sure what to do. He didn’t want to stand up—he was hard, and though Adam had surely seen, Ronan intended to leave the room with as much of his dignity intact as possible. They stayed that way, staring at each other, for a long time. Adam steepled his fingers, and rested his chin on them.
Finally, Adam said, “Stand up.”
Ronan stood up. His face was hot; tears still welled in his eyes. He blinked. One single, scorching tear rolled down his cheek—he let it. Adam watched it like a hawk, his eyes unsubtle in their tracking. Gingerly, Ronan pulled up his underwear, then his jeans, and buckled his own belt. When he was done, he met Adam’s penetrative gaze once more.
“You’re forgiven,” Adam said. “Don’t let it happen again.”
In a thick, wet voice, Ronan said, “Yes, sir.”
“Take that with you,” Adam gestured loosely to the page on the desk.
There were a few smudged lines on the sheet of paper where Ronan’s tears had blurred the words together. He picked it up off the desk and took it with him.
Back at his own desk, Ronan lowered himself into his chair with extreme caution. For a few minutes, he did nothing but sit and stare at the wall. He tried to make sense of what had happened, and how he felt about it. On one hand, Ronan felt vindicated: Adam was, in fact, a fucking freak, and he had at last won the satisfaction of pushing him to his limit. On the other hand, Ronan was sore, and definitely bruised, and still so hard that he ached.
He was also pretty sure that a few laws had been broken, though he wasn’t sure how to go about looking into that. He found, oddly enough, that he wasn’t upset. Despite the fact he had been thoroughly humiliated, he wasn’t angry. It was notable, for him, that he wasn’t angry. His mind thrummed with endorphins that replaced the reigning chaos of conscious thought. Eventually, the burn subsided and blossomed into an ache that made sitting an incredibly uncomfortable experience.
The phone rang. Almost automatically, Ronan answered it. He cleared his throat.
“Mr. Parrish’s office,” he said.
Adam didn’t come out of his office for the rest of the day. At the end of his shift, Ronan went home.
“How was work?” Declan asked.
“Fuck you,” Ronan replied as he stormed up the stairs to the guest bathroom.
He slammed the bathroom door shut and wasted no time in stripping himself off his clothes. Ronan kicked off his pants and pulled his shirt over his head with an eagerness that bordered on desperation. He twisted to look over his shoulder at his reflection in the mirror. Beneath the elaborate sprawl of the dark and complex tattoo that devoured the skin of his back, Ronan’s haunches were mottled with bruises, from apex to knee, clusters of wine purple with capillaries webbed beneath his skin. He exhaled slowly through his nose as he reached down to press his thumb to one of the darker marks; it throbbed.
Much like the bruises he came home with from the gym, the pain didn’t really bother him. It was a pleasant hum of peacefulness that superseded all other thoughts and feelings.
When he was finished admiring the various degrees of purple skin on his thighs, Ronan threw himself into a blistering hot shower. He wrapped a hand around his cock, and his knees nearly buckled at the immediate relief of it. He imagined Adam in his own shower doing the same thing: picturing Ronan’s naked body covered in bruises, conjuring up the memory of ragged sobs being torn out of Ronan’s throat.
Overwrought, Ronan sank to his knees on the cold tile and furiously worked himself over. He wondered what else Adam might do to him if he continued to make mistakes. He wondered how Adam might reward him when he started to get things right. That final thought was too overwhelming for him; his vision bled white at the edges as he came, swearing and choking as his entire body shuddered from the intensity. He pressed his forearm to the wall of the shower and rested his head against it. Water beaded on his eyelashes and pooled in his open mouth. Ronan wondered if Adam knew how badly this had backfired. It was not likely that after one punishment Ronan would straighten up and fly right. If there was one thing Ronan liked to do, it was get a rise out of people.
His mind kept returning to the mental image of Adam’s hard cock in his suit pants. Ronan’s sexual experiences were limited, almost non-existent. It thrilled him to know that someone like Adam was aroused by the sight of someone like Ronan bent over and bruised and crying. Being wanted in that way made him feel powerful, like he held the upper hand over Adam’s self control. If Ronan poked and prodded enough, he could provoke him into revealing more every time.
The water in the shower began to run cold. Ronan shivered as he grinned to himself, delighted by his devious new plan.
Work had improved.
The spanking didn’t change Ronan’s approach to his job. He had been doing it poorly on purpose in order to silently protest the unfairness of his position, and now he continued to do it on purpose in order to be punished. Adam was obviously a smart man, which meant he quickly caught on to the fact there was a scheme afoot. They arrived at a stalemate. Ronan refused to behave himself, and Adam refused to make him sorry for it. Frustration mounted steadily by the day while Ronan did his very best to be a nuisance. Nothing worked. Adam wouldn’t touch him. He had retreated within himself, into the cocoon of his office, and he seldom emerged.
When the bruises on Ronan’s thighs were gone, he started going to the gym again. He threw a lot of fights. He got his nose broken on someone’s knee, and missed an entire day of work while he lay in the ER with a concussion. Adam didn’t call to find out why he’d missed a shift, but he did take a full eight hours out of Ronan’s paycheck at the end of the month. His frigidity drove Ronan crazy. He snapped at clients, cussed out the paralegal, and didn’t bother to double check memos or correspondence for errors. The employee handbook deliveries stopped as abruptly as they’d begun.
On Friday, three weeks after Adam had beaten him, Ronan reached the end of his rope. Adam was in court trying to convince a judge that someone’s second cousin twice removed should be allowed to keep someone else’s Grandma's tea set or some bullshit, and he wouldn’t be back to regular office hours until Monday. He had announced his scheduled absences via a Post-It note left on Ronan’s keyboard, which was really the last straw. With a frustrated growl, Ronan tore the note into tiny pieces, and opened the bottom drawer of his desk to add it to the heap of unwelcome correspondence he’d received since arriving. The sight of three dozen unread employee handbooks greeted him. His anger dissipated in a heartbeat—he knew what he needed to do in order to get Adam’s attention.
Ronan stacked up all the handbooks, and leafed through each one. He highlighted the same passage everywhere it appeared.
Our fraternization policy is designed to help foster a professional and fair environment that respects the personal rights of individuals while managing potential conflicts of interest. It aims to prevent situations that could potentially disrupt the workplace or lead to inappropriate personal involvements that could influence professional relationships and responsibilities.
This policy applies to all our employees, including senior management, supervisors, full-time and part-time staff, and interns. It governs interactions within all levels and departments of our organization.
By the end of it, he had eighteen copies of company policy with the fraternization clauses picked out in blue. Ronan went into Adam’s office and put the stack on his desk. The top page bore a Post-It note that read ATTN: A PARRISH. On his way out of the room, he noticed the misters in the terrarium running, delivering a metered amount of water to the soil right on schedule. The room smelled like trees after rain, wet leaves and damp earth. It reminded Ronan of home, which plummeted him into an even more foul mood. He hadn't been back to the farm since the day they’d retrieved his car. The steward checked in every so often, reassuring Ronan that the land was cared for in his absence, but the reminders only served to make him more heartsick. Ronan slammed Adam’s office door with enough force that the hardware rattled. He left for the day, three hours early.
Even free from the office and no longer within tantalizing proximity to Adam, Ronan couldn’t shake his bad temper. He wallowed all weekend. In his defense, he didn’t try all that hard to adjust his attitude, since the only other person that stood to suffer from it was Declan. He kept his job, which only irritated him more; he might have preferred it if Adam called to tell Ronan he didn’t need to bother coming into work on Monday. That would at least be final, a clear nail in the coffin. Ronan wasn’t sure where he’d gone wrong. He’d taken the punishment as best as he could. He hadn’t called the cops. He hadn’t handed in his notice. He’d obeyed every order without complaint. It wasn’t clear why Adam had decided to pretend Ronan was suddenly nothing more than furniture. Ronan figured he was at least owed an explanation.
On Monday morning, Ronan took a long shower and shaved his head and sat in Declan’s kitchen staring at the clock until he was sure to be at least an hour late. He got in his car and drove the speed limit all the way downtown. When he arrived at the office, a purple Post-It note lay atop his keyboard.
Come into my office.
— AP
Ronan immediately broke out into a cold sweat. He glanced up and over his shoulder at the closed door to Adam’s office. Very carefully, he kept his expression controlled and his gait measured as he went down the hall. He knocked, once. He waited.
“Come in,” Adam said.
The first thing Ronan saw when he opened the door was the stack of handbooks, much more neatly presented than they’d been when he’d left them there. In front of the desk was a paper shredder and a large, empty wastebasket. Adam was behind his desk, wearing a tie that matched his eyes. He invited Ronan into the room with a beckoning hand. When the door was closed, Adam got right to business without offering him any pleasantries or explanations.
In a hard voice, he ordered, “Start shredding.”
Even though it was sure to be an arduous, grueling task, Ronan was pleased by the edict. He’d made a move, and Adam had countered it beautifully. He grabbed a stack of paper off the desk and knelt on the floor in front of the shredder. It took a long time. He emptied the paper bin into the wastebasket four times before he reached the end of the pile. When Ronan was done, the room felt as quiet as a tomb absent the constant hum of the shredder’s motor. He stood up, wincing slightly at the stiffness in his knees, and took the full wastebasket of shredded paper into his office. They were supposed to recycle it, but Ronan didn’t know how; he was assembling quite the collection of bagged shredded paper. He went back into Adam’s office to find the shredder gone, and Adam sitting behind his desk.
“Tell me something,” Adam said. “Was that meant to be a temper tantrum, or an overture?”
Unhelpfully, Ronan drawled, “What do you think?”
Heat flared in Adam’s eyes. Ronan watched him tamp it down before he spoke again.
“You should know what you’re really asking me for,” Adam said.
Ronan wanted to ask if Adam knew the difference between asking and begging. He lifted his chin. He pinned Adam in place with a level, pointed look, and said, “I’m not afraid of you.”
That was the remark that broke the camel’s back. The wheels of Adam’s chair groaned over the wood floor as he rolled away from his desk. He pressed his mouth into a thin, unchallengeable line, and pointed to the space he’d made in front of himself. Ronan responded to the silent direction. Excitement rippled down his back, lifting the hair on his arms as his stomach stirred with interest. He didn’t know what Adam was going to ask him to do, but he already knew he was going to do it. Adam carried a certain tension that spoke to a great amount of self control—Ronan trusted him because of it.
“I want you on your knees, under the desk.”
Adam adopted an elegant, easy sprawl in his seat while he observed Ronan’s silent compliance. His thighs fell open, pulling the fabric of his pants snug. The opening in the desk designed for a chair was just big enough for Ronan to fold himself into, on his knees, with his head bowed slightly. Adam unbuckled his belt and lowered his fly with deft, tapered fingers. Ronan started to salivate when Adam pulled his soft cock free from his white cotton boxers. He parted his lips expectantly; Adam laughed lightly at his eagerness. Hot humiliation made Ronan feel molten all over, like he’d been pulled loose and bent into a shape of someone else’s design.
“Just hold it,” Adam said.
Ronan nodded and shifted forward on his knees to take Adam’s cock into his mouth. It wasn’t difficult, though it was an adjustment; he went slowly to avoid choking, and he didn’t stop until the tip of his nose brushed the fabric of Adam’s undershirt. He could smell Adam’s skin, his laundry detergent, the leather of his belt, the salt of his sweat. Spit slipped in rivulets down his chin and neck. Once he had a feel for it, Ronan relaxed. He could breathe only through his nose, and he quickly learned it would do him no good to swallow; he closed his eyes and willed his jaw to fall open. Tears smarted at his waterline, a reflex in response to the weight against his tongue.
Adam stroked a hand over the crown of Ronan’s head a few times, soothing him through it. When he was still, Adam murmured, “Good boy.”
The praise was heady; Ronan felt his eyelids flutter as it melted his spine to liquid. Adam had positioned them so that Ronan was completely hidden from view, tucked behind the wood skirt of the desk, ensnared within the cage of his legs. The afternoon passed in fits and starts. What surely had to be no more than a handful of minutes after Ronan had settled, a client knocked on Adam’s door. Ronan stifled his flicker of panic as soon as it mounted; no one could see him, no one could touch him. His fear disappeared like smoke on a breeze. The conversation Adam shared with his client was boring, just the basics, details kept to a minimum. All the while, Adam traced the pads of his fingertips over the soft skin behind Ronan’s ear. Every so often Adam would shift, and Ronan would swallow, and he would feel Adam’s cock stir inside of him. The voices faded into the background, receding into nothing but a drone of ambient noise.
“Ronan,” Adam said. “You can sit up.”
Slowly, Ronan opened his eyes. They were alone again, and Adam was watching him keenly, his hands ceaseless as he coaxed him back to awareness. Ronan’s knees were stiff and his throat was sore; he wasn’t sure how long he had been kneeling. He lifted his head, and a silvery thread of viscous spit and precome glimmered in the air between the head of Adam’s cock and Ronan’s lower lip. Adam dragged his thumb over his chin, smearing the mess even further.
“Adam,” Ronan said in a low, rough voice. “Please let me make you come.”
Adam pressed his other thumb to the skin between Ronan’s eyebrows, and said, very gently, “Maybe next time.”
The initial disappointment of the rejection was soothed by the suggestion of potential future opportunities. Ronan stayed on his knees on the floor until he was coherent enough to stand, and then Adam sent him back to his office with a list of records requests to make. He floated through the rest of the day, unbothered even by the tedious and boring task of waiting for faxes to come in. Already, he was looking forward to next time.
After that, they fell into a rhythm. Adam referred to it as a dynamic. Ronan didn’t refer to it at all.
Ronan had rules. Ronan had to wake up and get dressed and be in the office by a certain time. Ronan was not allowed to touch himself without permission. Ronan was not allowed to lose fights on purpose. Ronan had to address Adam as Sir in the workplace. Ronan had to at least make an attempt to improve his typing and his people skills.
When he didn’t obey, there were consequences.
On a Tuesday, Adam called Ronan into his office. Adam was sitting on the leather sofa in front of the terrarium, the elegant bones of his face carved into eerie relief by the greenish-gold glow of simulated natural light through leaves. He was holding a folder.
“These are letters you sent to clients last week,” he said. “Do you want to guess how many of them have typos?”
Ronan did not actually need to guess. He stared Adam down instead. They both knew why Ronan had been summoned.
“Hands and knees, here, on the floor,” Adam said.
Without a word, Ronan crossed the room in a few long strides. He settled himself into the small space between the coffee table and the sofa. From where he knelt, he could smell the leather of the cushions. The carpet fibers were coarse against the palms of his hands. Adam stretched out his long legs to rest them atop Ronan’s back, crossed at the ankle. Ronan didn’t apologize, and he didn’t ask how long he was going to be kept on the floor. Adam wouldn’t have answered him, anyway. He lowered the folder full of letters down to Ronan’s eye level.
“Hold that,” he ordered.
It wasn’t possible for Ronan to hold it in his hands. He opened his mouth and let Adam slip the folder between his teeth. He held it. Occasionally, Adam would redistribute his weight, crossing and uncrossing his ankles, bending one knee to rest the sole of his shoe against the small of Ronan’s back. It wasn’t a particularly strenuous position, though his knees and his wrists did begin to ache as he fought to keep himself still. When Adam set his legs down and took the spit-soaked folder away, it took him a moment to realize he could close his mouth. Ronan was fuzzy, far-away and pliant. He let himself be hauled up and over Adam’s knee, and he didn’t protest when Adam pulled down his jeans and underwear.
A spanking from Adam’s hand alone wasn’t enough to make Ronan cry, but it was enough to make him feel like his brain stem had separated itself from his body. He offered all the usual responses: he whimpered and twitched and pleaded for forgiveness. Adam ignored him. When he was done, he yanked Ronan upright, nearly pushing him to his feet. He handed Ronan the folder.
“Do them again,” he said.
Ronan did them again. The second time, only one of the letters had an error in it—an accidental double space in the middle of a sentence. Adam spanked him again, and he made Ronan stand in the corner with his hands behind his head for most of the afternoon. After that, Ronan redid all of the letters. The third time, they were right. As a reward, Adam let Ronan crawl beneath his desk and hump his leg until he came in his pants. In that position, if he’d wanted to, if Adam had told him to, he could have sat forward and unbuckled his belt and pulled Adam’s hard cock free from the confines of his suit. To Ronan’s immense disappointment, Adam didn’t order him to do that. He sent Ronan back to his desk in his ruined jeans with four more letters to type.
On a Friday, two weeks later, Ronan confessed to touching himself without permission. Adam stripped him of his shirt, tied his wrists to the sturdy bronze hook that held back the drapes over his window, and dripped a candle down his back until every inch of his exposed skin was seared raw by hot wax. He bent Ronan over the arm of the couch and teased a plug into his hole before he sent him back to his desk with every nerve ending in his body alight. Despite the depravity of his imagination, Adam was generous with his praise. He lavished Ronan with innumerable murmurings of good boy and so pretty for me, baby and you took that so well. Ronan was good at obeying when he wanted to; once he decided to give that to Adam, his cooperation was almost without fault.
Adam loved it when he cried—Ronan loved the look on Adam’s face when it was obvious he liked something. So he cried. Sometimes it was frustration, sometimes it was pain, sometimes it was desperation; he’d never cried so much in his life, not so freely, not to such approval. He cried bent over the desk while Adam spanked him, he cried with a gag in his mouth while Adam edged him, he cried with Adam’s fingers down his throat, and he cried while he knelt with his face on the floor and his legs spread wide while Adam coaxed part of a peeled ginger root into his hole. On rare occasions, Adam would call the home phone at Declan’s house and tell Ronan what to do or what to wear or what to eat on Sundays. On slow afternoons, Ronan would crawl down the length of the hall with a memo between his teeth and wait on his knees outside Adam’s door until he was invited in.
They were careful, always aware of Adam’s schedule and always listening for the chime on the front door that announced comings and goings. Ronan liked the illicit nature of it as much as Adam did; even when the office door was locked and they were guaranteed privacy, the thrill of exposure was a constant underpinning of their affair.
The filing system improved office-wide. The calendar was once again color coded. The voicemail inbox was empty. Ronan won every fight he started at the gym, and he attempted to take the high road out of every fight he started at Declan’s house. The situation at work didn’t solve every problem; Ronan still had bad days and black moods and terrible nightmares. The positive changes were significant, though—even Ronan had noticed a shift in his own demeanor. The afterglow was sometimes his favorite part, when Adam would hold him in his arms and murmur praise into his ear and make it feel like nothing else in the world mattered more than Ronan. It was as close as he ever got to experiencing real tenderness and affection from Adam; he would have endured the most fiendish sadistic machinations of Adam’s desires if it meant he would get to hear that he had been a good boy.
Despite the fact Ronan was often naked and often bent over and often begging Adam to touch him, they did not have sex. The withholding frustrated Ronan to no end. Adam would allow Ronan to get himself off, but he had never allowed Ronan to get him off. In fact, Ronan had never seen Adam come. His self restraint was something of a marvel—if Ronan hadn’t been so infuriated by it, he might have found it impressive. It wasn’t an argument he wanted to start. Adam knew Ronan was a virgin, and while he’d fingered him and stroked his cock and watched Ronan come dozens of times over, he never tried to get inside of him. It was bizarrely considerate, taken in the context of their relationship thus far. Ronan continued to do as he was told, with near-perfect obedience and ribald enthusiasm, in hopes that one day Adam would want to cross that final threshold.
Little by little, Adam revealed more of himself to Ronan. Most of it was perhaps unintentional, and the rest of it was so inconsequential that only Ronan keenly observed it as something of note. Adam was an orphan. Adam was deaf in his left ear. Adam had lived in Virginia his whole life, with the exception of the seven years he’d spent at Stanford, first for his undergrad, then for his JD. Adam liked animals and plants and cars and puzzles. Adam was cynical and pragmatic and so, so lonely that it sometimes drained all the light out of his eyes. Ronan got the distinct impression that Adam did not really belong anywhere. He had fought tooth and nail to claim just one single place, and then he had sequestered himself inside of it, perhaps intending never again to emerge.
Ronan wondered why Adam had made the decision to allow him in; even though they were not engaged in what could be considered a romantic relationship, it was not difficult to see that Ronan was the closest thing Adam had to a friend or a partner. Armed with that knowledge, he fully intended to play the long game. Ronan believed that slowly but surely, Adam would come out of his shell, strip off his layers, and give Ronan what he was really after. Neither of them used the word boyfriend. Neither of them used the word love. Adam continued to insist upon using the word dynamic. In silent retaliation, Ronan still staunchly refused to use any words at all, since he knew Adam would not like the ones he had in mind.
They did not kiss. Adam would bite and lick and spit and he would skate his open mouth along the column of Ronan’s throat, but he would not kiss him.
Nearly eight months into Ronan’s employment and five months into their dynamic, Adam summoned Ronan into his office. He had no meetings booked for the day. The phone had not rung all morning. Ronan could only assume the rest of the afternoon was going to go very well for him. The door to Adam’s office was open; Ronan let it fall shut behind him. Adam was standing behind the terrarium, as he often was, gently rearranging fronds and petals with tweezers. Droplets of water quivered on stamens and rolled down the glass like beads of sweat. He was wearing his brown suit and a beige dress shirt. His tie was the same dark color as his suit. Ronan knew from experience that his socks would match his shirt and his shoes would match his belt. A letter lay on Adam’s desk.
“Pick that up,” Adam said.
Ronan did. He recognized it as one of his own letters, but there were no copy edits noted anywhere on the page, no highlighted passages, no scribbled addendums. A frown creased his forehead.
“That’s a very good letter,” Adam said. “Your Latin is as good as mine.”
Ronan’s Latin was most definitely better than Adam’s, but he didn’t say that. The point of this exchange was not to question the extent of each other’s abilities. Anticipation stirred in the pit of Ronan’s stomach. He was going to get what he wanted, he knew it; he was going to slot the very last piece of the puzzle into place.
“I think you’ve earned a reward,” Adam said.
He dusted the soil off of his hands and gently closed the lid to his terrarium. Adam’s inherent magnetism was more pronounced in moments like these, when he moved with an almost predatory grace into Ronan’s personal space. Tension drew the air out of the room.
Ronan could not have asked for a better opening. He elegantly lowered himself to his knees in one fluid motion. He wanted to beg, so badly, to crawl until he was as close to Adam as he might be allowed, to say please please please please until Adam put something in his mouth to shut him up. He wanted to cry; he wanted to bruise; he wanted his jaw and his throat and his knees and his holes and his thighs to ache for the rest of the day. If his decision to lower himself caught Adam off guard, he didn’t let on; instead, he took it in stride. Adam looked down his nose at Ronan, pinning him in place with his clear blue eyes.
“You’re very good at that,” Adam remarked. “Did you spend a lot of time kneeling before we met?”
“I’m Catholic,” Ronan replied. “Will you let me suck your cock?”
There, at last, the animal of Adam’s body won over the machine of his mind. He was surprised by Ronan’s request. His nostrils flared slightly—the only outward display of shock, and perhaps, interest.
“Is that really what you want?” Adam asked.
“Yes, sir,” Ronan said. “I’ll make it good for you.”
Adam didn’t reply. Carefully, Ronan lowered his weight to his hands, and crawled across the office to where Adam stood. He kept his gaze trained on Adam’s wide eyes as he reached up to undo his belt. The jingle of the buckle and the hum of the zipper made Ronan’s breathing pick up; he swallowed, anticipating the pressure of Adam’s cock in his throat. He was hard by the time Ronan got his pants down, hard and flushed pink and wet at the tip. Ronan stuck out his tongue and let the head of Adam’s cock rest there for just a moment before he sat forward. He went slowly, at a measured pace, determined not to be overwhelmed by the task ahead of him.
It was a wet, messy process; Ronan gagged several times, a full-bodied spasm that made tears rise up in his eyes. He pulled back to breathe, laving his tongue along Adam’s length, and he hummed quietly with satisfaction when he took Adam back into his mouth. Adam was quiet, only betrayed by the minute tremble of his lower belly as he held the muscle taut. His face was a little wild, and his chest expanded rapidly with deep, bracing breaths. Ronan did his best to keep an eagle eye out for the flickers of pleasure that passed rapidly through Adam’s body like electric currents. That in itself was rewarding, to see the way Ronan affected him deeply enough that even Adam, a paragon of self-denial, started to come apart at the seams. When Adam’s legs began to shake, Ronan sat back.
“Why haven’t you fucked me yet?” he asked.
His voice was raw, placed low in his chest, laden with more vulnerability than he’d meant to convey. Adam looked momentarily taken aback by the question. He’d likely been planning to come down Ronan’s throat and send him on his merry way, and now a wrench had been thrown into his plan by the goading remark. Ronan leaned forward again and slowly took him back into his mouth, and stayed, still, with the tip of his nose pressed to the warm, trembling skin of Adam’s lower belly. Almost subconsciously, Adam started to rock his hips forward, fucking himself just a tiny bit deeper. Ronan struggled against the burn of a gag and furiously blinked away tears.
Breathlessly, Adam asked, “You want me to fuck you?”
Ronan couldn’t reply. He lifted his heavy, lidded eyes to Adam’s, and worked his muscles in a swallow around the cock in his throat. A teardrop webbed his heavy eyelashes; he blinked, dappling the skin of his under eyes with salt.
Adam exhaled through pursed lips. He was undone, more overwrought than Ronan had ever seen him. A little bit of Virginia had snuck into his voice, stretching his vowels, softening the ends of his sentences. His pupils were wide and dark as he held Ronan in consideration.
“Get up,” Adam said. “Take off all your clothes.”
He sounded just as ruined as Ronan, drawn tight and stretched thin as he attempted to rally himself. Ronan wiped his chin with the back of his hand, smearing spit and precome all over his face and fingers. Adam’s fingers shook as he tucked his cock back into his underwear. He left his fly unzipped. Sweat beaded his forehead. Ronan rose to his feet and took off his clothes, one garment at a time. When he was down to his socks, Adam halted him.
“Stop. Go bend over the desk. I need to—just wait there. Go.”
Ronan did as he was told. He bent over the desk, with his elbows braced against the wood and his legs spread and his back arched the way he knew Adam liked it. For a moment he let his head hang heavily between his shoulders. He closed his eyes. Adam moved quietly around the room. He opened a drawer, then closed it again, and set something on the desk in front of Ronan. The unmistakable sound of someone putting on a glove brought him back to his body, and he opened his eyes. A bottle of lube sat on the ink blotter in front of him. He lifted his head. Adam pressed a palm to the small of Ronan’s back, adjusting his posture.
The first finger was Adam’s thumb, not sinking inside, but tracing slow, slick circles over Ronan’s rim. He felt his nerve endings begin to respond, though it was nothing more than a light, teasing touch. Ronan breathed deep into the pit of his stomach and watched Adam’s reflection in the glass cabinet doors. The way he zeroed in on Ronan’s body when he touched it was rapturous; on the rare chance Ronan got to watch his face while he did, it was an overwhelming sight. Just the tip of his first finger had Ronan gasping, the ladder of muscle along his spine pulling tight and as he drew his shoulders together.
“Yeah?” Adam asked, his focus intense. “You think you can come like this?”
It was a rhetorical question; Ronan could, and he had. He bore his weight down into the polished wood of the desk and canted his hips back. He didn’t swallow the soft sounds that rose up in his throat, and Adam rewarded him for it; he built him up to two fingers unhurriedly, with copious amounts of lube and the occasional punishing drag of his knuckles in and out of his hole. Ronan was going to come on Adam’s fingers, he was sure of it. He was being set up to fail. Part of him wondered what the consequences would be. Part of him was excited to find out; part of him already regretted the fact he wasn’t going to be able to wait until Adam was inside of him. As if he could read Ronan’s mind, Adam coaxed a third finger inside. Ronan groaned, low and long. His thighs were shaking. It was the farthest Adam had ever stretched him; it was the fullest he’d ever felt.
“Can I come?” Ronan asked. “Please, Adam, can I come?”
“Not yet,” Adam said. “You can wait, I know you can.”
Adam’s voice was low and encouraging, intensely focused on Ronan’s responses. Warmth pooled at the base of Ronan’s spine as he whined, a thin and reedy sound that wavered through the air. His entire body had started to shake. Adam’s other gloved hand found its way between Ronan’s legs, ghosting slippery fingertips along his cock, gently cupping his balls, purposefully pushing him closer to the apex. Tears smarted on Ronan’s cheeks, and he was breathing wet and heavy against the surface of the desk. He didn’t know when he’d started to cry; he didn’t know when he’d started to drool.
“I’m gonna come,” Ronan panted. “Adam, I want to come, please.”
“I’ll count to ten,” Adam said. “You’ve been such a good boy already, I know you can give me ten more seconds.”
He twisted his fingers, working the ridge of his knuckles further into Ronan’s hole. Adam’s hands were relentless, rapidly increasing in pace, in stark contrast to the even meter of his voice as he counted off the seconds. At eight, Ronan groaned; at nine, his vision went white; at ten, he felt his knees buckle beneath him as he came, with blood roaring in his ears and Adam’s fingers pressed deep inside of him. He knew he was crying, moaning thank you over and over again while Adam fucked him through it, wringing everything out of him.
Before he had fully finished trembling through the aftershocks, Ronan was hauled upright and forced to his knees. His limbs felt like jelly. It took immense effort for him to open his eyes. He could see the front of the desk, streaked with come; he could hear Adam talking to him.
“Lick it up,” Adam said. “I won’t fuck you until you clean up your mess.”
He knew what Adam wanted him to do; it didn’t occur to him to balk. Ronan propped himself up with one unsteady hand flat against the floor and sat forward on his heels. Mindlessly, he pressed his tongue to the wood. The tip of his nose dragged against the surface. It didn’t take him long, and he didn’t focus on the mechanics of it. Instead, he placed himself outside of his body and imagined what he looked like to Adam, his haunches still lilac with bruises from the last time Adam had paddled him, his back bowed as he obediently took his own come into his mouth.
When he was finished, he sat back on his heels.
“That’s so good, Ronan,” Adam murmured. “You’re always so good for me, baby. Do you still want me to fuck you?”
Ronan nodded. His mouth hung open; spit dripped from the tip of his tongue onto the shiny hardwood floor. Adam peeled off his gloves and dug his thumb into Ronan’s lower lip, forcing his jaw wide.
“Roll over,” Adam said. “Spread your legs for me, show me your hole.”
He was glad to obey that instruction, although Ronan’s knees and elbows protested the speed with which he scrambled to present himself. A shiver raced through him when he pressed his cheek to the flooring. He felt the weight of Adam’s body behind him, against him, shifting into position. He heard himself panting with anticipation. Teasingly, Adam tapped the head of his cock against Ronan’s hole, slipping it through the lube that had accumulated on the skin there. Tears immediately welled in Ronan’s eyes when Adam began to sink inside. It was so intimate it hurt, not physically, but like something had been planted, bloomed, forever altering him. Adam’s cock was hotter, heavier, more present, more personal than anything Ronan had ever had inside of him. He felt all the air ribbon out of his lungs alongside a moan as his oversensitive body adjusted to the stretch.
“Fuck,” Adam sounded just as overwrought as Ronan. “You’re so tight. God, Ronan, fuck.”
“Please,” Ronan whimpered. “Please, Adam.”
The sharp bones of Adam’s hips dug into the meat of Ronan’s body; the fabric of his suit pants felt like sandpaper against his superheated skin.
“Yeah, I know,” Adam said. “I’ll take care of you, baby.”
Adam made good on his promise and fucked him into the floor with a dizzying push-pull of merciless intensity. Ronan took it, along with the endless slew of praise that Adam poured into his ear. A keen note of overstimulation made everything feel sharp edged as the lines between pleasure and pain were braided together at the forefront of his awareness. He wished that he had waited to come; he hoped he would get another chance to find out how it felt to come with Adam so deep and so close. When Adam began to falter, Ronan pressed his shoulder blades together and bore down around Adam’s cock. A choked, bitten-off moan tore itself from Adam’s chest as he came, buried to the hilt in Ronan’s body. As one, they melted to the floor, facedown, dead weight. Their breathing steadied; their pulses slowed.
The room felt empty, suddenly, absent the frenetic activity. Ronan wanted to cry. He didn’t. He closed his eyes. Right as their position began to cause discomfort, Adam sat up and rose unsteadily to his feet, leaving Ronan boneless and pliant, lying on his belly.
“Baby,” Adam said. “Can you stand?”
With a groan, Ronan rolled onto his back. He blinked against the bright bulb of the ceiling fixture. Adam offered a hand and hauled him to his feet. They stood face to face, Adam fully clothed with his fly still undone, Ronan naked with tears and sweat and come and lube all over his body. Color sat high in Adam’s face, a blistered pink that seared his complexion from the ridge of his nose to the tips of his ears. He zipped up his pants and rebuckled his belt. Wordlessly, he handed Ronan’s clothes to him, one article at a time, and watched while he dressed.
“You can take the rest of the day off,” Adam said, a little awkwardly. “If you want.”
Ronan wasn’t sure if he’d heard him right. “What?”
“It’s fine if you’d rather stay,” Adam said. “I’ll pay you for the day no matter what.”
Despite everything Adam had subjected him to within the walls of the office, that comment was the most humiliating thing anyone had ever said to Ronan. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Adam’s attempt to course correct had only added insult to injury. Really all Ronan wanted in that moment was to be held, and instead he found himself on the defensive, trying to make sense of the fact he had been summarily dismissed.
“Fuck you,” Ronan snapped, and then again, “What?”
Adam ran a hand through his hair and sighed, one sharp, punched out huff of exasperation. Testily, he said, “We talked about this. You knew what you were getting into when you agreed to participate.”
That was too much. Ronan would have preferred a slap in the face to a callous remark like that.
“Participate?” Ronan echoed incredulously, with more vitriol than he had ever before directed at Adam. “Are you fucking kidding me? Mother of Christ, you’re an asshole. You want to pay me for the rest of the day, like what, like I’m some cheap whore you only call up when you need somebody to slap around? Are you serious?”
“You know that’s not what I meant,” Adam said. “Stop putting words in my mouth.”
Ronan clenched his hands into fists. The placid, pacifying tone of Adam’s voice only served to further infuriate him. He didn’t need it thrown back in his face that not only had he accepted the terms and conditions, signed on the dotted line, he had also come crawling back for more every time. It wasn’t Ronan’s fault that Adam had a dozen complexes and neuroses all warring inside of him; it wasn’t fair that he should suffer the consequences. Adam had never been one for pillow talk—but he had never put Ronan out in the cold, before, either.
“You are such a fucking coward,” he said. “You’re so goddamn scared you might be feeling something human that you immediately throw up your walls.”
Adam clenched his hands into fists, his posture mirroring Ronan’s. “I never said I was feeling anything. You need to go.”
Confusion and frustration tore Ronan to pieces. Moments ago he had been crying on his knees, thanking God and anyone else who could hear him for what he’d been lucky enough to receive, and now Adam’s eyes were so vacant and remote that it felt like he was staring right through Ronan, as if he was nothing more than glass or air. He wasn’t expecting a profession of love—he was just under the impression he was worthy of a little common decency. It wasn’t easy to do what Ronan did, and Adam was typically much more appreciative of his willing surrender. Nothing made sense. There was fear in Adam’s face, but also fury. Ronan hadn’t done anything wrong; he was sure he hadn’t.
“Make me,” Ronan demanded. “Man the fuck up. Look me in the eye and tell me that this means nothing to you, and I’ll leave.”
“This?” Adam sneered. “It’s not my fault you’ve decided this is something it’s not.”
“You are going to die alone,” Ronan said. “You are going to run away from everything and everyone forever, and when it’s finally fucking over, you are going to wonder why your life is so fucking empty. And when that happens, I want you to remember that I said this to you. I want you to think of me saying I told you so. You think anyone else is going to love your weird ass the way I could?”
The word slipped out, traitorous and terrible. At the sound of it, Adam surged forward, crowding Ronan back against the wall. In the same instant, he drew back a fist. Ronan did not believe for a second that Adam was going to punch him. He didn’t flinch. He had never flinched, not in childhood, not in adolescence, not in the hospital, and he was not going to start now. Ronan let Adam see that he was not afraid of him. He let Adam hold him against the wall, while he tried to decide what to do with all of his anger. In the end, Adam did not punch Ronan, and he did not punch the wall. He tapped his fist against the paint, once, twice, so softly that it was almost inaudible.
“Get out,” Adam said.
The hushed tone of his voice was unnerving; he was glacial, unwavering. Ronan understood that he could not be pushed any further.
“Fine,” Ronan said. “Fuck this place, anyway.”
He left Adam alone in his office. He didn’t pause to take anything from his desk on the way out. He grabbed his jacket off the hat tree and stormed out to his car. He drove around for hours, making constant loops of the downtown area until enough of the day had passed that he could go back to Declan’s. He didn’t have the strength to explain an early return; he knew Declan would likely draw his own unfavorable conclusions.
Ronan’s body ached. He cried in the shower, hot, angry tears, as the water pummeled his shoulders. The turmoil of the day had exhausted him. When the hot water ran out, Ronan dripped all over the floor on his way to the bed. He burrowed under the covers and closed his eyes. Later, Declan knocked, asking if he wanted dinner. Ronan ignored him. He didn’t know what he wanted, but he was sure dinner would not abate the raw edge of his mental anguish. He kept his eyes closed, and he hated himself for fucking everything up, and then he hated Declan for forcing him to get a job, and then he hated Adam for everything else. Around and around he went, his moods peaking and plummeting, until at last, exhausted, he fell asleep.
When the letter arrived announcing that Ronan had been relieved of his position at the law firm, Declan was not surprised. All he said was, “Figures.”
For Declan, it was just another fuck up in a very long line of Ronan-related fuck ups. To Ronan, it was that, but also something more. He didn’t come out of his room for several days after the letter came. It wasn’t losing his job that upset him—it was losing Adam. The separation was pointed and purposeful, nothing more than a few impersonal lines on company letterhead, sent standard mail. Adam couldn’t have been more clear, nor more brutal, if he’d tried.
After a week of moping, Ronan got up and went to the gym. He let someone punch him in the face a few times. After that, he went to the grocery store, because he didn’t want to go back to Declan’s. The weight of his disapproval was stifling on a good day, and had become very nearly life threatening in the last few days. Ronan was tired of feeling like a failure. He had failed to be what Declan wanted him to be as a sibling; he had failed to be what Adam wanted him to be as an employee. There just didn’t seem to be any scenario in which Ronan could win. He was adrift in a world that did not need him.
He didn’t look for another job, because he didn’t need another job. He had failed at a job, so he didn’t need to try again. He had failed at killing himself, so he didn’t need to try again. He had failed at personhood, so he didn’t really see the point in continuing to try anything at all ever again.
The chilled section of the cavernous big box store was freezing, cold enough that Ronan shivered in his sweatpants. He stood in front of the enormous refrigerators and scowled. The foggy glass doors gave everything inside the appearance of being distant, far away and murky. It all looked grey, although he knew it wasn’t—it would be bad business for every company to label their product in the same boring color. He was sure that behind the glass there must be blues and pinks and yellows, but he couldn’t see them. All he saw was gray. The selection overwhelmed him; it was enormous, which seemed very wasteful. This grocery store and all its refrigerators and its fluorescent lighting and its self-checkout registers probably ate energy like a black hole. Disillusioned and a little disgusted by the idea of participating in such wastefulness, Ronan abandoned his basket in the cereal aisle and stalked out to his car. He paused. His car was gray, and it always had been. He looked up at the sky. That was gray, too.
It reminded him of the day he was admitted. The hospital issue sweatpants he’d worn had been gray; the cinderblock walls of the facility had also been gray. Ronan had let himself float, awash in a sea of nothingness, for a long time. Few things held his attention; the blasé skyscape of DC wasn’t visually stimulating, and appeared hostile in places. Ronan hated DC. He missed the vivid color palette of the mountains back home, the way they’d appear purple at sunset, blue in the afternoon, green in the middle of spring. Ronan got into his car and started driving. He didn’t intend to go anywhere, at first, but eventually, he found himself in Adam’s neighborhood. The houses were all prominently numbered, which made it easy to locate the house that belonged to him.
Ronan parked his car a good distance down the block and walked back up the street to stand on the curb in front of Adam’s yard. The brown grass was neatly manicured, even in the dead of winter. An occasional raindrop slipped free from the sky and landed on the shoulder of Ronan’s leather jacket. It was always raining everywhere, the sky perpetually weepy like an open wound. From the street, he could see that one entire wall of the first floor was made up of windows. He walked up the driveway, and crouched down behind an enormous hedge that ran along the property line between Adam’s driveway and his next door neighbor’s. It might not matter if Adam saw him, but his presence felt clandestine, all the same.
Through the plate glass window, Ronan saw Adam on a treadmill, running like he had something lashing at his heels—sweat soaked his white shirt and his hair and the crotch of his blue gym shorts. He wasn’t wearing headphones, and, as far as Ronan could tell, he didn’t have the TV or stereo on. It was clearly intended to be a punishing, joyless process. No music, no background noise, not even the news to occupy his mind. With some bitterness, Ronan wondered why Adam was always preparing himself to run away. It reminded Ronan a little bit of a hamster, running to nowhere, never wondering what might be beyond the walls of his enclosure. He knew that Adam’s natural state of being was not complacency;, he just wasn’t sure when he’d decided to stop taking an active role in his own life.
The sky opened up, soaking Ronan to the skin. He turned away from the warmly lit windows of Adam’s living room, and went back to his car. It would be easy to give up—Adam definitely intended for him to do just that. Ronan was surprised to find that he didn’t want to give up. He had failed, and he wanted to try again. The worst thing Adam could do was file a restraining order, and even that didn’t strike too much fear into him. Ronan decided that what he needed was a plan. He needed a way to plead his case that would hold water if subjected to any cross examination. He sequestered himself in the guest room of Declan’s house with his laptop and a copy of the Parrish law firm employee handbook. By the end of the night, he had assembled a plan of action. He cleaned up his notes and highlighted the most important talking points and paced the length of the room dozens of times over while he perfected his argument.
He called Adam’s office and used a fake name to make an appointment for a consultation on the following Monday. When that day arrived, Ronan woke up early. He showered and shaved and got in his car. He drove the speed limit all the way downtown. The welcome chime sounded when he opened the front door to Adam’s office building. A woman sat behind the desk in a frumpy blue plaid dress. She was older; she had a tight, mean-looking mouth and rust red hair marbled with steely gray. She did not greet him. She merely lowered her head to peer over her glasses at Ronan.
“Do you have an appointment?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Ronan said. “He’s expecting me.”
“I’ll let him know you’re on your way in,” she said.
Ronan turned and headed down the hall. He didn’t knock before opening the door to Adam’s office. Inside, Adam was seated behind his desk, wearing a dark blue suit. He blinked, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Ronan shut the door. Adam blinked again, and then opened his mouth to say something. Ronan did not want to hear what he had to say. If he understood the sequence of events that took place in a court of law correctly, each party of counsel was entitled to the opportunity to present their opening argument without interruption.
“Are you taking on new clients?” Ronan asked. “I need an attorney.”
“Okay,” Adam frowned. “That depends on the matter.”
“It’ll be a fucking doozy,” Ronan assured him. “Have you ever taken a sexual harassment case?”
“No,” Adam said. “I haven’t.”
“Well, that’s fine.” Ronan said. “That doesn’t necessarily disqualify you.”
A small smile tugged at the corner of Adam’s mouth. He schooled it quickly, and gestured to the sofa. “Have a seat.”
Ronan sat.
“What brings you to my office?” Adam asked.
“I’m thinking about suing my boss,” Ronan replied. “It’s a whole thing. He got me all involved in some scandalous workplace affair. We used to fuck in his office and everything, and then he fired me when I told him I was probably in love with him. That’s got to be illegal, right?”
“Not necessarily,” Adam said. “Do you think you have enough there to be able to meet the burden of proof in trial?”
“Well, I’ve read the handbook,” Ronan said, and he held up his folder. “It’s all right here. Take a look at this, and then tell me if I’ve got a case. Maybe we could sue for emotional distress.”
Adam regarded him for a moment. Ronan could practically see the gears turning in his head as he thoroughly weighed his options. At last, Adam rose out of his seat and crossed the room. He took the offered file. He didn’t open it; he merely held it in his hand. When he spoke, it was in a small, soft voice that made Ronan want to reach out and pull him into his arms. Then, he remembered he was supposed to be righteously indignant while he sent Adam on the guilt trip of a lifetime in order to prove a point. He kept his hands to himself.
“You’re sure you were actually in love with him?” Adam asked. “That might change things for you.”
“Yeah.” Ronan leaned back against the couch cushions. “I’m sure.”
“How long? I mean, when did you know?”
“The day I met him, I guess,” Ronan said. “Definitely the first time he ever touched me. What’s with the third degree? It’s a little early for trial prep.”
“Ronan,” Adam said. He dropped the folder onto the coffee table. “I’m sorry.”
“I know your retainer is pretty high,” Ronan continued, as if Adam hadn’t spoken. “I did my research. I can have my brother send your office a wire transfer. Unless you’d prefer a check. Are money orders still a thing? I could always do a briefcase full of cash, if that’s more your style.”
Adam took a few small, yet decisive, steps towards him. Again, he said, “Ronan.”
“There’s no police report,” Ronan said. “This is strictly confidential. Just between me and you.”
Without another word, Adam sank his knee into the sofa next to Ronan’s thigh and straddled his lap. Ronan could feel his resolve wavering. Adam smelled masculine and expensive; the fabric of his suit pants pulled taut around the muscle of his thighs. He was so warm, so close to Ronan that he could feel the heat of his body. Out of all the potential outcomes he’d considered, Ronan had somehow not imagined it being this easy. It was impossible to believe that Adam would give himself over without putting up much of a fight at all. Perhaps this was the fight, another test, another way to see just how far Ronan could be pushed. He didn’t want to believe that was the case—he wanted to believe that Adam knew Ronan could only be challenged physically, not emotionally. If he was bent, he would break.
“I’m only prepared to have serious conversations about this matter,” Ronan said. “Don’t jerk me around. There are plenty of good attorneys in this city who’d die to be the face of this scandal.”
“I don’t think you’ll even make it to the grand jury,” Adam sounded very sure. “I think he’s going to settle. It’s likely we’re looking at a very hasty resolution to your suit.”
“I don’t want to fucking settle,” Ronan said. “I want to take him for everything he’s got.”
“Baby,” Adam murmured. “Let me kiss you.”
“Objection,” Ronan said. “You’re leading the witness. You have a code of ethics. Wait until the bar association hears about this.”
Adam was smiling when he kissed him. It was an unhurried, all-consuming kiss; it was the first time anyone had ever kissed Ronan. He wanted to run a victory mile, grinning and sweating and buoyed by the fact that Adam had folded like a house of cards and practically poured himself back into Ronan’s arms. When he’d kissed Ronan quiet, Adam leaned back slightly to whisper in his ear.
“I’m not afraid of you,” he said.
A lump formed in Ronan’s throat. “You’re just saying that because you know the law is on my side.”
“Smart ass,” Adam said. “I hope you’re a better housewife than you are a secretary.”
“Please,” Ronan scoffed. “I speak fluent legalese. I’d be an asset to any attorney in town.”
“Maybe,” Adam said. “It’s too bad none of them can have you.”
Ronan rolled his eyes. He reached out and slipped a hand beneath Adam’s suit jacket to fit his palm around the curve of his ribs. They kissed again, or perhaps had not really stopped kissing, wrapped up entirely in the moment. The catharsis of forgiveness rendered them both lazy and satiated, braced against each other’s bodies.
“Our prenup is going to be so ironclad,” Ronan said. “I’ll make sure it leans heavily in your favor. My brother’s going to fucking hate you.”
Adam hummed softly against Ronan’s mouth. “He doesn’t need to concern himself with that. I know a great estate management attorney.”
“Oh, yeah?” Ronan asked. “Is there any chance he’s looking to hire a secretary?”