1
The Way It Begins
In the car, he takes a breath, and his eyes close. He leans back and tries not to hear the voice of his brother laughing at him as he was leaving the office. Alejandro is subtle to most people—he always has been, but his siblings saw the best and worst of him long before life proved what the worst could actually be. Louis especially, because he’d clung to Alejandro like a shadow when he was little, then hovered like a ghost in his periphery when they were older and Alejandro was too busy to care what his baby brother was doing.
Now, with Louis underfoot all the time at the office, there’s nowhere for Alejandro to hide, and Louis notices even the most subtle shifts in his routine. He supposes that’s expected when you grow up with an older brother whose life is dominated by routines and compulsions that even the most intensive therapies can only take the edges off.
And he wants to pretend like he can remember what normal is supposed to be like, but he’s not really sure he’s ever known. And not just with his OCD or his overwhelming grief, but some days it feels like he sprung to life in a cloud of chaos and discord.
He was born in Derbyshire to parents who had been living there for all of six months after emigrating from Spain. His dad was working on a start-up, getting his fingers in tech, which was new and still a little scary to the rest of the world. Without NASA, it was just science-fiction, but his dad had ideas. He was a working-class man with an engineering degree and a firm grasp on English. It was enough for people to start taking him seriously, but it took more than a few years for him to get there.
Alejandro still remembers a couple of skint birthdays, but they’re faded, foggy memories eclipsed by their homes getting bigger and their cars getting more expensive. He started seeing his future in terms of a company take-over, and his passions fell by the wayside. Those little primary school declarations about what he wanted to be when he grew up turned into funny memories for his parents to tell around the dinner table—firmly rooted in another universe where a quieter, more humble version of him existed.
Some days, when he can let himself think, he wonders if his daughter would have turned out like him, or if she would have fought to keep her sense of self, untainted by the pressures of money and success. She was sweet and bright and perfect—but she would have grown up a child of this world, and he knows first-hand how utterly consuming that is.
He sometimes thinks that what truly broke him was the realization that money and prestige couldn’t protect her or the people he loved from tragedy and loss. Money can’t stop a single clock, and it can’t bring back the dead. It can’t fill the hole in him shaped like a grinning three-year-old with her hair in bunches and a smudge of dirt on her cheek. His entire world crumbled to ashes in less than a year, and the only thing he has left is his name on a building and far too many zeroes in his bank account.
Alejandro knows his life is a mess—that he is a mess—but that’s who he is now. And it never ceases to be painful, the way people watch him and wait for him to either break down entirely, or grow numb to the pain that losing his family caused.
It was yet another way he knew he’d never be able to escape this hell that grief created around him. It was just another reason why he’d offered his business card and a promise of more to a man in a dirty car park with the bright eyes and trembling hands. It was why he had his secretary draw up a contract that was binding almost nowhere, putting a monetary value on Avery’s time with hopes that Alejandro might find someone to finally—finally—fill the silent void, even if it was just for an hour or two a week.
“You want this,” he tells himself as he sits behind the wheel of his car. He can see the hostess in the restaurant window trying and failing not to watch his internal freak out.
“You need this.” He bites the inside of his cheek as the words echo around him. He glances out the window and waits until he can count four blue cars. It’s enough to settle the white-hot, painful sparks of anxiety hovering at the base of his spine.
He drums his fingers on the steering wheel as he counts. One, two, three—tap tap tap. One, two, three—tap tap tap. He shifts over and pats his pocket to make sure he has his key fob. He checks the console to make sure he hasn’t left his medication in there. They’re in his small carrying bag that he loops around his wrist. He shakes it to hear them rattle, then he gets out.
Putting his hand into his pocket, he thumbs the fob, feeling for the bumps before he pushes down. The car beeps twice, and he grabs the handle to check, knowing he’ll only check again before he gets in. But this helps. He knows his face is passive—he knows strangers can’t read him. He knows his tongue won’t do much to form words or to settle whatever fears Avery might have the moment he sits in front of him for the first time since they signed the contract.
Alejandro thinks about the first time he saw Avery—the way he was messy and wet and flecked with dirt. He looked like he radiated rays of the sun in his smile, and it was the first time in so many years that Alejandro’s heart skipped a beat. He should have kept driving—if he knew what was good for him, he should have kept driving.
But, Alejandro supposes, he’s never really known what was good for him. And something about the younger man triggered a feeling in Alejandro that he thought long dead. A feeling that eclipsed even the strongest desire he’d ever had for Connor. It was senseless need that was eclipsing all of his rationale, and it had him pulling over into the charity car wash, digging for what cash he had in his pockets, and sending a prayer to the universe that he wasn’t making the biggest mistake of his life.
He’d never forget the way Avery looked when he approached—the slack-jawed, wide-eyed wonder and suspicion. Alejandro hadn’t even counted the bills he shoved at the younger man, he just kept their gazes locked and hoped he could invoke the same, powerful want, so Avery would be helpless against anything except telling Alejandro yes.
He’s not sure it worked. Avery had showed up to sign the contract, but there was a tremble in his hands and expectation in his tone that Alejandro knew would ruin them both. Because Avery wanted more than Alejandro would ever give, and his only hope was that Avery would be willing to settle for less. He felt like a bastard—because he was one. The worst kind of man, but he had no intention of changing. He knew the hell weakness could bring. He was too bloody intimate with the pain that loving and losing caused, and although he was a selfish prick, he knew it would be better this way.
He’d have Avery—and Avery would have him. But only in the form of a contract that promised two things: money, and an eventual end. In reality, he expected the younger man to turn him down, but Avery said yes. To all of it. And now here they were.
Opening the restaurant doors, Alejandro’s aware that all the eyes are on him. He’s used to it, of course. It’s the nature of the beast. It’s bearing the Santos name, which is also emblazoned on a massive tower above his building downtown. It’s on products and boxes and letterheads—a legacy in print that means less when the stock market crashes and more when it soars.
He doesn’t squirm under the attention, but he wants to. If this had been his teenage years—before the therapy and the medications really started working, his brain would go to strange places. He’d get stuck in a loop of thinking something was wrong, and he wouldn’t be able to rest or calm down until he tapped his fingers and counted in his head and found every single blue object in his room. And it’s still like that, sometimes, even if those spirals are fewer and far between.