Page 57 of Knocked Up By the Silver Foxes

KILLIAN

The space thing was my idea and I’m beginning to resent myself for it.

Asher is on the couch in my office with his vodka and the expression of a man who has been quietly furious for two weeks and is running low on quiet. Maddox is at the window with his whiskey doing what Maddox does when he’s trying to look like he’s not thinking about something, which is think very visibly about it while pretending to look at the view. I’m at my desk with my scotch and the meeting notes I stopped reading forty minutes ago because the words stopped connecting to meaning somewhere around page three.

It’s been two weeks.

Two weeks of correct, appropriate, carefully maintained distance, and what it has produced is the three of us in my office at nine in the evening drinking in a triangle of mutual irritation while the woman we’ve all been giving room to spends her evenings elsewhere.

The right call. All of us agreed.

It is currently very difficult to remember why.

Two weeks ago I told myself this was the right thing to do and I believed it. I still believe it in the abstract, the theoretical version of it where giving someone room is a generous and considered act. What I failed to adequately account for was the practical experience of it, which is as follows: watching Killian Thorne conduct himself like a professional in every interaction he has with a woman he thinks about constantly, while Maddox performs casual disinterest badly enough that even the vendor staff have noticed, while Asher sends unsigned room service to her suite three times a week and then pretends he doesn’t know who sent it. We are, collectively, a disaster. Three grown men in our forties and fifties sitting around acting like the world’s most overdressed teenagers and fully aware of it, which somehow makes it worse.

“She had lunch with him again today,” Maddox says, to the window.

“I know,” I say.

“Yesterday too.”

“I know.”

“And the day before.”

“Maddox.”

He turns from the window. “Why the fuck did we agree to give her space?”

“We’re fucking idiots, that’s why,” Asher says into his vodka.

“You need to stop,” Maddox says, pointing at him.

Asher looks up. “Stop what.”

“The Raphael commentary. You’ve said his name eleven times today and I’ve only been in the same building as you for three hours.”

“I haven’t said his name eleven times.”

“Ten. I might have miscounted.” Maddox drops into the chair across from the couch. “You’re obsessing.”

“I’m not obsessing. I’m observing.”

“You’ve observed him into double digits before dinner. That’s obsessing.”

“Says the man who had his assistant pull Raphael’s full employment contract this week to check his schedule.”

There’s a pause.

“Kyle is thorough,” Maddox says.

“Kyle does what you tell him.”

I set my scotch down. “Both of you.”

They look at me. I look at both of them and take a moment to reflect on the fact that between us we have built companies, negotiated with governments, operated in financial markets that would break most people, and we are currently bickering about an employment contract like a pair of jealous twenty-two year olds.

“Raphael,” I say, “is not the problem.”