The Boss's Confession

Seventeen years. That is how long Julian has wanted to kiss somebody, and he has never once said so out loud, to anybody, including himself in writing. The lock on the bottom drawer of his desk had been his father's idea. He tests it now, brass key cool against his thumb. Three-quarters of a turn and the mechanism clicks home with a sound like a door sealing shut. There is nothing incriminating in that drawer. That is the part that would be hardest to explain. Leo is the junior nobody expected to last. His sketch was dismissed in a meeting by a man who did not look at it properly, and he took the note, and rebuilt it overnight, and said nothing — and that is the moment, although neither of them identifies it as one for another eleven chapters. There is a door Julian keeps locked and a site where they both, in different senses, fall. There is the weight of a foundation that has been signed off by somebody who should not have signed it, a late night worked because neither will leave first, and a risk Julian did not plan for and takes anyway. There is a lantern festival, and a star drawn on a lantern by somebody who does not usually draw. *He keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop. He keeps waiting for me to leave or betray him or turn out to be exactly what his worst fears say I am.* *Then he's—* *I'm going to keep telling you until you're sick of it.* *I don't think I'll get sick of it.* *Good.* Julian kisses him. Soft. Reverent. The way he has wanted to kiss somebody for seventeen years and never permitted himself to. Let the board convene. Let the firm have its opinion, in writing, through the proper channels. Julian will put the whole practice on the table before he lets one of them make Leo smaller.