Javier could see what his friend was getting at, but he still objected. “I did go to his house. Right away on Friday. We talked about it, and because neither of us were in the right state of mindto deal with anything, we decided to take a few days to get our heads on straight.”
“It’s Wednesday,” Maisy pointed out.
“Your point?”
She stared at him. “Honestly. If Melanie and I were as boneheaded as you and your Desmond, we would have missed out on some of the best parts of our life together.” She shook her head, then asked, “Have you talked to him yet?”
Javier didn’t have a quick reply. He hadn’t. He’d sent Desmond a text on Sunday night, but it had just been a check-in and a goodnight. Desmond had replied with a short text saying he was okay, that was it.
Hardly the stuff of relationship history.
“He’ll call me when he’s ready to talk,” he said, suddenly feeling less certain about that than he wanted to be.
“Or maybe he’s waiting for you to call him and he thinks you won’t because you’ve decided you’re done with him,” Maisy pointed out.
Javier froze. Shit. She had a point. As much as he wanted to think both he and Desmond were grown adults who could approach bumps in the road with maturity and grace, the fact of the matter was that they were just people. Just people who had already made mistakes and were licking a whole lot of wounds that they’d received lately.
And part of their original deal with each other was that they would only be in each other’s worlds on weekends.
Well, fuck that. The deal had been broken already. They were well and truly involved in every aspect of each other’s lives now, not just the fun, good parts. He owed it to Desmond, to the man he loved, to speak to him as soon as possible.
“I need to get out of here,” he said, pushing himself to stand. “I’m going to take a long lunch and go over to Desmond’s office and see if he’ll talk to me.”
“That’s the first smart thing you’ve said in this entire conversation,” Maisy said, getting up with him. “But what do you want to do about, well, everything here.” She glanced around the office.
Javier stopped as he reached the office door and leaned against the jamb. He couldn’t fight back the tide anymore. It was time to throw in the towel and admit defeat.
He glanced back at Maisy with a mournful look. “I think it’s time we start looking at wrapping the whole thing up,” he said, pain in his heart. “You’re the one with legal training. I need you to research what we need to do to close the business.”
They were words he’d hoped he would never have to say.
“What about current jobs on the calendar?” Maisy asked, following him out to the outer office.
“There’s only one,” Javier admitted. “That ridiculous rich kid’s birthday party in Surrey on Saturday.”
“The one where they requested a ‘high-class clown’?” Maisy’s face twitched as she spoke, reflecting the way Javier had felt about the horrible request, too.
“That’s the one,” Javier sighed. “I’ll take the job. I’m definitely a clown at this point, and it’s not like I’ll have a whole lot else to do this weekend anyhow.”
Maisy’s expression registered surprise. “You don’t think you’ll be able to patch things up with your man?”
Javier didn’t want to answer the question. With his entire heart, he wanted to say that it would be an easy fix and that all he and Desmond needed to do was talk. But in reality, he worried that too much damage had already been done.
“One way or another, I have to do the job,” he told Maisy, meaning it in more ways than one.
He was going to do everything he could to pull him and Desmond out of the mess they’d been thrown into.
He left the office and headed out, marching to the nearest Tube station. He had no idea how Desmond would react to him showing up at his office wanting to talk things through. He had no idea what was even going on at Desmond’s place of work after Friday night. There was a chance everything had gone to shit and Desmond was in some sort of trouble.
That only made the journey out to Canary Wharf feel like it took forever. By the time Javier made it to Desmond’s building, he was itching to find Desmond and ask what was going on. Maybe the radio silence over the past few days wasn’t a great idea after all.
He could tell as soon as he stepped out of the lift into the reception area of Pickering Jones that something was out of the ordinary. The office looked like offices usually did, but there was a strange sense of upset in the air. The smartly dressed, middle-aged woman at the reception desk looked harried as she spoke to a tall, imposing black man in a suit while her phone rang and rang.
Javier held back and waited for things to be less chaotic. Not for the first time on his way over to Desmond’s office, he wondered if he should have called or texted first. He’d figured that just showing up was the best way to avoid any possibility of Desmond putting him off, but now he wasn’t so sure.
“Can I help you?” the receptionist asked at last as the black man took a step back. Javier thought he recognized him from the awards dinner.
“Um, I’m here to see Desmond White?” Javier asked, definitely feeling like calling first would have been the better way to go.
