For The One(38)

“Liam,” my cousin says. I should have realized it was him when my nearby coworkers all went silent. Adam doesn’t appear in the art department very often, and though our office is pretty casual, people still get intimidated by the CEO showing up unannounced.

Sometimes I do too, even though I was the one always picking up his shorts off the bathroom floor throughout our adolescence. He also ate up all my favorite breakfast cereal on a consistent basis. In fact, Adam annoyed me greatly when he first came to live with us. Fortunately, it didn’t take long for that to change.

I straighten and look at him. “What?”

“I need you for a sec. Let’s take a walk.”

Let’s take a walk. That’s his favorite way to have a short, discreet conversation with an employee. There may even be a meme of it floating around here somewhere. Or a funny little cartoon drawing of my cousin standing at some employee’s desk asking to take a walk.

When Adam wants to take a walk, it’s usually not a good thing. It is a logical way to get some privacy in an open-concept office, I suppose. But if Adam needs to speak to me, he knows exactly where I live and is well acquainted with my phone number, too.

Without a word, I save and close my work, remove my glasses and set up my desk so that it’s perfectly arranged for me to pick up where I left off after the lunch break. I trail behind him off the floor of the art department, ignoring the gazes following us. None of them will dare to ask me the details later, so I ignore them.

We’re walking down a back hall on the way to R&D when he stops for a minute and turns to me. “I don’t have a lot of time, but I needed to have a quick conversation with you. Whatever the hell is going on between you and Jordan needs to stop.”

I fold my arms across my chest and he seems to take great interest in that gesture. “Nothing’s going on between me and him.”

“That’s not a good thing. I get that he pissed you off. He pisses me off a lot, too, but he’s your friend. He’s my friend, and most importantly, he’s your boss.”

I shrug. “So are you.”

His eyes look up at the ceiling, then fly back down. “Yeah, we’re family. That’s different. We’re stuck with each other, and if we ever did get like that, your dad would probably kick both our asses. Jordan is a good guy. He screwed up, but he genuinely feels bad about it. And I can’t have another feud going on in my office, Liam.”

He’s referring to the dispute I had with Gene, a former co-director in the art department. We had artistic differences, and apparently those differences had been broadcast everywhere. We’d both been branded the “temperamental artists” by employees in other departments.

Things had been okay until the day that he blatantly took credit for my work. From then on, I refused to work with or even speak to him. Adam tried to do what he could to resolve the issue, but in the end, Gene found a job somewhere else. Adam ended up admitting that it was no great loss to have him gone.

“Look, you need to learn to separate the professional from the personal.” Adam straightened. “Jordan didn’t fuck you over—”

“He did. He gave me bad advice.”

Adam took a long breath and released it. “But it was you who chose to take that advice. You need to work on what it means to forgive someone. In the end, this hard-ass attitude is only going to cost you, not others.”

“My ass is not hard.”

Adam looked away and laughed. “No, I mean…look, I love you, guy, but you do have a problem with this. In all the years that I’ve known you, you’ve never been the forgiving sort.”

“Why should I be? If someone ruins their chance with me, then that’s it. They’re gone. I don’t need people like that in my life.”

Adam was rubbing the back of his neck now and looking down the hall in both directions. “So people can’t be human and screw up? If they make a mistake, they’re dead to you forever?”

I shake my head. “I’m not going to kill anyone.”

“It’s an idiom, Liam. It means you’ll act like they are dead even if they aren’t. You’ll sever your relationship with them? It was one thing when it was Gene. He proved that he had no morals whatsoever and ended up going somewhere else—win-win for us. But that’s not happening with Jordan, okay? He’s not going anywhere, and you have to learn to get along with him.”

When I say nothing, he sighs and looks at his watch. “I have to get going for a lunch meeting off campus, but dude, think about this. What if your first duel had been your only chance to beat that other guy? You got your second chance—give one to Jordan. That’s all I’m asking.”