My Rival, My Partner

Chapter Six: What Marcus Sees

Marcus's POV

Marcus Reyes had been Callum Ashworth's assistant for two years, which was long enough to have developed a working taxonomy of his boss's moods. There was Boardroom Callum, all polish and pre-loaded charm. There was Father Callum, quieter, more careful, prone to checking his phone with the specific dread of a man waiting for a verdict. There was Tired Callum, who ordered too much coffee and forgot to eat lunch. Marcus knew all of them the way you knew the furniture in a house you'd lived in a long time.

He did not have a category for whatever Callum had become in the three weeks since the joint proposal started.

It announced itself in small, uncharacteristic ways. Callum had started humming, actually humming, off-key, some tuneless thing under his breath while reviewing drawings, which Marcus had never once heard him do in two years of early mornings and late nights. He'd stopped double-and triple-checking his own emails for tone before sending them, a tic Marcus had always privately found exhausting to witness. He smiled at his phone unprompted, which Marcus had only ever seen happen around videos of Callum's niece.

Marcus arrived at the Transit Authority building on a Tuesday with a stack of files Callum had requested, and found the shared office in a state that told its own story before either occupant said a word: two coffee cups instead of one on Dane Copper’s side of the table, the distance between the two drafting stations noticeably narrower than it had been the last time Marcus delivered anything here, and Callum Ashworth laughing, really laughing, head tipped back, nothing performed about it, at something Dane had apparently just said.

Marcus set the files down carefully, like a man defusing something, and cleared his throat.

"Delivery," he said.

Callum straightened, composure sliding back into place a half-second too slow to be convincing.

"Marcus. Thank you."

"Mm-hm." Marcus glanced between the two of them, Dane, who'd gone back to his sketch with studied focus, ears faintly pink; Callum, who was very deliberately not looking at Dane, which was its own kind of tell.

"I'll just leave these here, then. Don't mind me."

He left with the specific, satisfied restraint of a man who had seen exactly what he came to see and intended to say nothing about it until absolutely necessary.

That evening, over the dinner that had somehow, over the past two months, become a standing Tuesday fixture between him and Claire Vasquez, Dane's colleague at Voss & Marsh, whom Marcus had met at a permitting meeting and now argued with over noodles roughly once a week under the thin pretense that it was purely professional networking.

Marcus brought it up before the appetizers arrived.

"Your boy's in trouble," he said.

Claire didn't look up from the menu.

"Which boy, and what kind of trouble."

"Dane. And I don't mean trouble trouble. I mean the kind of trouble where my boss hasn't stopped smiling in three weeks and there were two coffee cups on Dane's side of the table today, and one of them very clearly wasn't Dane's, because Dane drinks his black and the second cup had enough cream in it to constitute a dairy product in its own right."

Claire finally looked up, something sharpening in her expression that told Marcus she'd already been building her own case file.

"He's been humming," she said slowly. "Dane. At his desk. I haven't heard him hum since before the Brindlewood thing fell through."

"Callum keeps starting sentences and not finishing them. Which, for a man who bills three hundred dollars an hour to finish other people's sentences for them in negotiations, is new."

They looked at each other across the table with the specific, delighted alarm of two people who had just confirmed a shared theory.

"How long," Marcus said, "do you think it takes them to actually say something to each other about it."

"Dane won't say anything first. He's stubborn and he doesn't trust good things that happen easily." Claire considered it.

"Callum strikes me as the type to overthink himself into silence too, if today's evidence is anything to go by."

"Twenty bucks says it takes a natural disaster."

"That's oddly specific."

"There's supposed to be a storm system moving through next week. I have a good feeling about it."

Marcus lifted his water glass like it was something finer. "Twenty bucks. Storm does it."

Claire clinked her glass against his, grinning despite herself.

"Deal. And for the record, I think you're an i***t, and also I think you might be right, which is somehow worse."

Neither of them mentioned, that night, how many Tuesdays this particular dinner had quietly become a fixture on both their calendars, or how neither of them had once suggested moving it, or how Marcus had started looking forward to Tuesdays the way you looked forward to things that mattered more than you were ready to admit.

That, Marcus told himself, walking home afterward with his hands in his pockets and a small, unreasonable smile he couldn't quite talk himself out of, was an entirely separate matter, one he had absolutely no intention of examining too closely, for exactly the same reasons he suspected Dane and Callum hadn't examined theirs.