Marc looked at me in surprise. “Do with him? I didn’t know anything needed to be done about him.”
“Not like…punish him,” I said quickly. “But once he calms down, I’m afraid he’ll retreat into that nervous, self-conscious mode he was in when I first assigned him as a Guide. Why did it have to be Rowan I assigned him to? Why not someone well-established who just needed a new Guide? What was I thinking?”
“You thought he was more ready than he believed he was,” Marc said with a smile and a shake of his head. “And one incident doesn’t make the entire thing a failure; you should know that better than anyone. Treat yourself as you would any of the men here whenever they run into a problem or don’t meet their standards. You wouldn’t let them beat themselves up for…what? A situation we couldn’t have predicted?”
I glanced at the door. “You’re off to talk to Rowan, then?”
“Yes,” he said with a sigh. “I wasn’t expecting someone to be sent to check on us without so much as a warning.”
“Seriously, is this sort of espionage common?” I wondered with a frown.
“When you invest in something, you like to know it’s an investment worth having. Undoubtedly, the people he’s been representing want to make sure they’re not throwing their money into a hole,” Marc said with a shrug.
“Then what was the point of investing in the first place?” I demanded, gesturing around us. “Did we not make our case good enough the first time?”
“I’ve said this to you before and I’ll keep saying it, it’s just business,” he said and then sighed when I opened my mouth. “Some of our investors believe in what we’re doing here and willthrow money our way as often as possible because of that. But the majority? It’s optics. We were already operating on shaky ground, creating a space that was exclusively male; you had a few battles of your own over that.”
“We skated by the discrimination clauses because you made a couple of calls,” I grumbled. “There was next to nothing I could do about it, even though I tried.”
“You did, and you fought like hell. Some of these investors want to make sure that where financial activity can be traced, they’re not risking throwing money at something that could look bad on them.”
“I still don’t understand what could be so bad about this place that they have to send a spy, I mean…a spy?”
“An auditor,” he said, but smiled when I scowled at him. “Semantics aside, I’m sure they’re just being cautious. I won’t fault them for that.”
“Please tell me you’ll at least give them a bit of hell?”
“Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m not happy that they went this route, and it is uncommon for them to do it so quietly,” he said with a frown. “That said, I can’t raisetoomuch of a fuss, but I’ll figure out a way to let them know I’m not happy about it. How much I let them know will, of course, depend on what I pull from Rowan.”
“Wait, what?”
“His report. If it’s going to be favorable, then I’ll have more weight to swing around. If it’s neutral, it’s less weight. And if it’s negative…well, I’ll be left to beg and barter.”
“Wonderful,” I said with a sigh. “Let me know how that goes.”
“Look,” Marc said, catching me by the wrist before I could get too far and pulling me back. I wasn’t so lost in my own stress that I didn’t feel my heart lurch at the sudden, familiar touch. “I know I’m talking to a wall, but don’t beat yourself up over this, Reggie. Some people don’t understand how much you’ve putinto this place, how much has your blood, sweat, and tears in it, but I’m not one of those people. I know what this place means to you, so don’t go thinking you’ve somehow failed it just because we’ve hit a roadblock that may just be a speed bump instead, alright?”
“I’ll try,” I told him, wanting to pull away but not wanting to be obvious about it. I’d worked hard to make sure Marc never understood my fondness for him, and our bond had changed for me over the past couple of years. I’d thought he was handsome the first time Malcolm had introduced us years ago, but I’d never thought about it more than that, not when the love of my life was there keeping stars in my eyes. That had changed at some point, and now I was working my ass off to make sure that Marc, of all people, never realized that. “By which I mean I’m going to throw myself into digging up all the evidence, and when I get a call from the medical ward, I’ll visit Mitchell to see how he’s doing.”
“Throwing yourself into work is one way to keep the demons at bay, I suppose,” he said, as if he wasn’t the sort to bury his brain in work rather than deal with whatever was going on. I’d watched him deal with the cheating of, separation from, and then divorce from his wife. That year, Arete had never seen more financing and bureaucratic boosts as Marc had buried himself in work, but I had also noticed that he hadn’t been sleeping and his private liquor store was frequently touched.
“I’ll be good,” I told him, relieved and disappointed when his hand slipped from my wrist and he stepped away to deal with the other two. Marc wasn’t a touchy-feely person, even with those he was comfortable with. I rarely had to brace for him touching me, so on the odd occasions when it happened, I was always taken off guard.
I stepped through the door opposite the one Marc had gone through, taking the next available door instead of following the hall to the end where the stairs up to Marc’s office were. This wasthe part of the facility where I liked to think the magic happened, or at least, a different magic from the healing and recuperative magic where the guests were. This, though, was where I spent most of my time when I wasn’t out in the thick of things. I glanced through the first door to look at the people who handled the day-to-day maintenance of the building, at least on the tech side of things.
I stepped in. “Alright, boys and girls, good morning.”
“Girl,” Angie corrected with a shake of her head. “Singular.”
“My dear lady, you have my deepest, most heartfelt apology for not respecting your status as the sole female member of staff,” I told her with a snort, bowing to add emphasis.
She rolled her eyes. “It’d be more accurate to call me your dirty little secret.”
I wrinkled my nose. “I’m not sure I like what that insinuates.”
“Everyone knows you’re as gay as a neon rainbow flag tied to a maypole in the Castro District mid-June,” she said with a sigh.
“That’s…quite gay,” Dan, one of the other members of my crew, said with a snort. “Is it possible to be that gay without leaking glitter all over the place?”
