Page 51 of Wait for Him

I've been through enough therapy in the years since to understand the fucked-up wiring better than the actual therapist by the second session. I can name the mechanism, diagram the avoidance, tell you precisely why control became the thing I reach for whenever the ground shifts beneath me. I know why being sexually dominant makes my body feel safe. I know why surrender requires a level of trust I almost never have available to give.

Very insightful.

Gold star.

None of which changes the single inconvenient fact currently making it impossible to answer my emails, which is that the itch is back, insistent and familiar, and I know myself well enough to know it isn't going anywhere until I find somewhere safe to put it down.

“Are you homosexual?”

Ms. Monroe's question lands like a record scratch and snaps me clean out of my dark spiral and back into the conference room, where I have clearly been staring into the middle distance long enough to miss the run-up to it.

I turn my head and look at her.

She's perfectly serene, pen poised over her notebook, like she's just asked whether he prefers still or sparkling.

Then I look at Michael.

His entire face has gone to stone.

I turn promptly toward the window to hide the smirk that has absolutely no business existing in a meeting this important.

“No, Ms. Monroe. I am not gay.”

The words come out clipped and glacial, the exact tone of a man being asked this question for the second time in two days, because I asked him the same thing yesterday at his place after the footage broke and got served the identical frosty response.

There's something deeply restorative about watching someone else field it for a change.

“Understood.” Ms. Monroe makes a note.

That's it.

No awkwardness. No apology. No not that there's anything wrong with that. She simply collects the information and moves on while Michael sits there looking like he's reconsidering every decision that brought him into this room.

I like her.

I make a genuine, professional effort to stay connected to the discussion as she moves through her prescription for rehabilitating my brother's public image.

The list, as far as I can follow it through my hangover, includes cleaning up his social media presence, limiting unsupervised public appearances, several strategically boring charitable engagements, acquiring a girlfriend and, I am not making this up, getting a pet.

Nothing says upstanding citizen wrongly photographed nude in a public fountain quite like a golden retriever and a woman willing to be seen holding his hand.

I glance toward Jackson.

He catches my eye from farther down the table and raises one eyebrow.

I press my lips together.

Do not laugh. This is serious.

“Ms. Monroe.” Michael leans back in his chair. “No disrespect to your efficiency, but that plan's a little too on the nose. It screams cliché. Overdone. And considering you're the best at what you fucking do...” He actually punctuates the words with air quotes.

Air quotes. In a board meeting.

I slowly lower my pen.

What the fuck is he doing?

“I'd assume you'd know that's the oldest trick in the proverbial book,” he continues, “and come back to me with something containing at least a shred of originality.”