My Rival, My Partner

Chapter Eight: The Client Dinner

Dane's POV

The dinner had been the city liaison's idea, a chance for the two firms to present a united front to Halloway Museum's board of directors before the schematic design phase went public, over wine and small plates at a restaurant with the kind of lighting designed specifically to make everyone look slightly more successful than they actually were.

Dane had worn his one good suit. Callum, predictably, had made his look like it cost half what Dane's had, which was somehow more irritating than if he'd shown up in something obviously expensive.

"You clean up well, Copper," Callum murmured, low enough that only Dane could hear, as they were seated at the long table between two board members who were already deep in conversation about parking allotments.

"Don't start."

"I'm complimenting you."

"You're doing the thing where you say something normal but make it sound like a dare." Dane reached for his water glass to have something to do with his hands.

"I know your voices, Ashworth. That one means trouble."

"All my voices mean trouble, according to you."

"That tracks."

The dinner itself went smoothly enough, both of them slipping into the practiced choreography of professional partnership they'd built over the past month, Callum fielding the board's questions about budget with easy confidence, Dane grounding every answer in specifics, community impact, the actual texture of what the building would mean to the people who'd use it. Watching Callum defer to him on those points, genuinely defer, not performing generosity for the board's benefit but actually believing Dane's read on it, did something warm and dangerous to Dane's chest that he tried and mostly failed to ignore.

By the time the board members filtered out, satisfied, Dane and Callum were the last two left at the table, and something in the air between them had shifted the way it always seemed to lately when the professional performance ended and it was just the two of them again.

"Walk you to your car?" Callum said, which wasn't really a question.

The parking garage was mostly empty at that hour, concrete and fluorescent light and the distant echo of someone else's engine turning over three levels up. Dane's car was on the far side, and the walk stretched out longer than either of them seemed inclined to hurry through.

"You were good in there," Callum said.

"With the board. You always are. I think that's what got under my skin, that first day at the conference, I've spent my whole career being the one who's good in rooms like that, and then you walked in and were somehow better at it while pretending you didn't care about being good at it at all."

"I care," Dane said. "I just don't perform caring the way you do."

"No," Callum agreed, quiet, something in his voice gone soft and unguarded in a way it rarely was outside the shared office.

"You don't perform anything. That's, Dane, that's the thing I can't stop thinking about, if I'm honest. You're the first person in a long time who's looked at me and I couldn't tell what you wanted from me. Everyone always wants something. My name, my father's approval by proxy, an investment, a connection. You never have."

They'd stopped walking. Dane hadn't noticed exactly when.

"Maybe I want something too," Dane said, quieter than he meant to. "I just haven't figured out how to say it without it changing everything."

Callum's eyes were very dark in the garage's poor light, fixed on Dane's with an intensity that made the air between them feel thin, charged, the kind of quiet that comes right before something irreversible.

He stepped closer, not much, just enough to close the last of the distance, and Dane felt his own breath catch, felt himself leaning in without deciding to, close enough now to see the exact moment Callum's gaze dropped to his mouth.

Callum's phone rang, shrill and sudden in the concrete quiet, shattering the moment so completely that Dane actually flinched back a full step.

Callum swore under his breath, glancing at the screen, and something closed over his face like a shutter coming down, the easy warmth gone in an instant, replaced by a tightness Dane recognized now, the same tightness he'd seen the day the calendar reminder had vanished from Callum's laptop.

"I have to take this," Callum said.

"Who is it?"

Callum looked at the screen a moment longer before answering, and the name on it, even upside down and half-glimpsed, was clear enough: *Dad.*

"It's nothing," Callum said, which was, Dane was beginning to understand, exactly what he always said right before it very clearly wasn't.