My Rival, My Partner

Chapter Ten: Two Truths

Dane's POV

"Just business"

sat wrong in Dane's chest for the rest of the week, the way a splinter sits wrong under skin, small enough to ignore most hours of the day, impossible to forget the moment he pressed against it.

Callum hadn't been lying, exactly. Dane could tell the difference, usually, between Callum's deflections and Callum's outright dishonesty, and this had the particular flavor of the former, a door closing gently instead of slamming. That should have made it easier to let go. Instead it made Dane more curious, in the specific, stubborn way he'd always been curious about buildings that didn't quite make structural sense from the outside, the kind where you knew something load-bearing was hidden somewhere, even if you couldn't yet see where.

He waited three days before bringing it up again, partly out of respect for whatever boundary Callum had drawn in that parking garage, and partly because he needed the time to figure out how to ask without it sounding like an accusation.

"Your dad calls a lot," Dane said finally, on a slow Thursday afternoon, keeping his eyes on his drawing instead of Callum's face, giving him room to answer or not answer without the pressure of being watched while he decided.

Callum's pencil paused, just slightly, against the paper.

"He's involved in the firm. It's not unusual."

"At eleven at night? After a dinner where the only thing that happened was us talking to board members about parking?"

"He has people everywhere, Dane. It's not exactly subtle."

Callum's voice had gone careful, measured, the tone Dane recognized now as armor going up piece by piece.

"He heard about the dinner. He had opinions about how it looked."

"How it looked, or how it was?"

Callum finally looked up, and there was something raw underneath the careful measure of his expression, something that looked almost like being caught.

"Does it matter?"

"It matters to me,"

Dane said, quiet, deliberately echoing the words Callum had said to him weeks ago in a hallway by an elevator bank, back when this had still been strangers sizing each other up instead of whatever it had become since.

"You don't have to tell me everything. I'm not asking for everything. But I'd rather know if there's a version of this where your father decides I'm a problem to be solved, so I'm not blindsided by it later."

The silence that followed stretched long enough that Dane thought Callum might not answer at all. When he finally did, his voice had lost its careful edges, gone rough and honest in a way that made something in Dane's chest ache.

"He wants me to use this," Callum said.

"The proximity. Find something on your firm, something he can use if the partnership doesn't go his way. I told him no. I've told him no every time he's brought it up. But he doesn't really understand no, not from me, not about things he's decided matter."

Dane set his pencil down carefully, processing this, not shock, exactly, because some part of him had suspected something like it since the calendar reminder, but the confirmation still landed heavier than he'd braced for.

"And the parking garage call?"

"A warning. That if this..." Callum gestured, vaguely, at the space between them, at weeks of narrowing distance and shared coffee and a hand turned palm-up on a drafting table, " becomes a liability, he'll handle it. His words. Handle it. Like you're a line item."

Something cold and clarifying moved through Dane at that, not fear, exactly, though there was some of that too, but a kind of settling resolve, the same feeling he got looking at a bad structural problem and deciding, calmly, how he was going to fix it instead of panicking about the crack in the foundation.

"I'm not scared of your father," Dane said.

"You should be a little. I am, and I've had thirty-one years of practice."

"I'm not scared of him," Dane said again, steadier. "But I am asking you not to hide things from me because you're scared of him. That's different. That's the thing that'll actually break this, Callum, not your father's threats. You deciding, on my behalf, what I'm strong enough to handle knowing."

Callum's expression did something complicated, guilt and relief tangled together, like a man setting down a weight he hadn't realized how badly he needed to put down.

"Okay," he said. "No more of that. I promise."

It was, Dane would think much later, a promise Callum meant completely in the moment he made it, and also a promise that would prove far harder to keep than either of them understood yet, because there was a difference between deciding not to hide something and actually finding the courage to say it out loud when the stakes got high enough to make silence feel, in the moment, like the kinder choice.