Stray for You (Rainbow Rescue Cat Café #3)

Chapter 2

Chapter Two

Julian

THE MOMENT I SWAGGER into the office, co-workers raise their hands for high fives. I nod at a woman who winks at me. I accept a coffee from a guy who knows I like it with plenty of cream and sugar. By the time I drop into the chair in my cubicle I’ve got a little cluster of fellow sales reps gathered around me.

“So, how was Nashville?” one says. “Come on, give us the juicy details.”

I glance around like I actually care about our boss catching us. I don’t. Mostly because I know our boss doesn’t care about us swapping “war stories” this way. It happens every time one of us jets off to some sales conference somewhere. It’s like a game — everyone knows what happens after hours at these conferences, and we compete to see who can come home with the wildest story.

Usually, I win.

“Well, I can tell you this much,” I say, “they certainly take the Southern hospitality seriously down there.”

This earns me a round of laughter. My eager crowd includes women as well as men, and all of them know I’m not picky about gender myself. This sort of thing used to be a boy’s club, but these days, everyone’s getting in on it. Look, we aren’t sales reps because we’re geniuses. We’re sales reps because we’re charming and easy to look at. No employer would put it on a job posting, but everyone knows it’s part of the gig. People buy more stuff from pretty people.

I smooth my perfectly shaggy blond hair as I launch into stories of my escapades. This hair gets me a long way, both on the work side and the play side. A sunny smile and blue eyes don’t hurt either. I’m built for this shit, which is helpful, since I love doing it. I don’t care about the pharmaceuticals I’m supposed to sell. I could be selling water to a river for all I care. This job is less about the product and more about the people buying and selling it.

Case in point, the reps clustered around me in my cubicle, hanging on my every word as my stories get wilder and more elaborate.

“ Both of them said yes?” Cathy says.

“Both,” I confirm with a cocky grin.

“Shit, man,” Jacob breathes.

Someone fist bumps me.

“You should hold classes or something,” Brad says. “I seriously don’t know how you do this every time you’re out on a job.”

“Natural talent,” I say.

Everyone laughs again, but it rings hollow. They say these things every time. I tell them stories every time. It always goes more or less like this. The interactions could be a script we’re all following, the laughter the hollow applause demanded of a studio audience.

I hold onto my placating smile as long as I can as the group drifts off, everyone returning to their separate cubicles to pretend to work for the day. Honestly, if I’m not at a conference or in a doctor’s office trying to sell him on some new drug, I don’t really do all that much. What’s the point of a sales rep when I’m not selling anything? But we’re all supposed to come into the office in Manhattan and act like proper full-time employees.

I have some emails to answer, and I drag out the process as long as I can to keep myself busy and away from my thoughts. There’s always a crash after the high of a conference. Coming down from being desirable and funny and interesting to a huge group of people often leaves me deflated. All that awaits me here in New York are these hollow interactions with my co-workers. At lunch, I’ll tell the same stories I just recited to the same people I always talk to around here. The cycle will repeat, but it never leaves this building. We don’t get drinks after work. We aren’t friends outside of this setting. Their smiles are like mine — performances.

Sure, I get plenty of sex living life the way I do. I never struggle to find that, at least. But if I claimed the encounters were more than physically fulfilling, I’d be lying.

I have money. I have sex. I have a good job. I have my looks. But at the end of the day it’s me alone in my sweatpants in an empty, though beautiful, apartment.

There’s only been one relationship in my life that ever felt like more than that, though the other party would probably disagree.

Cameron Ortiz.

When our moms started dating, he was horrified, but I was thrilled. I grew up near him. Went to the same high school. Somehow ended up at the same university. Our lives followed parallel tracks. To me, our moms dating was fate. His dad had just left; I’d never known mine. Our families were supposed to come together this way.

Cameron hated every second of it, however. He hated me for every second of it. Yeah, I didn’t exactly make things easier with how I liked to mess with him, but the guy was so damn uptight about the whole thing. If he could have relaxed for two minutes, he might have seen the potential there.

Was it the brother thing? It has to be the brother thing.

I liked calling him brother when our moms were together, but even if they’d gotten married, we wouldn’t really be brothers. We had nothing in common. We grew up in separate families. We had separate lives. And we were both already adults when our moms got together. We wouldn’t be brothers any more than any two strangers off the street.

He’s in Seattle now, apparently. I heard about it from our former Boyfriend Café co-worker Henry. I guess Cameron wanted to get as far away from me as possible after our moms broke up.

I’m staring blankly at an email that I haven’t managed to read a single word of in the past twenty minutes when someone knocks on the wall of my cubicle. My boss, Garret, leans his hip against the flimsy partition.

“Have a minute?”

It’s not like I can say no to my boss, but I pretend to finish up an email and nod. I follow him through the office, winking at a co-worker here or there when they notice our passing.

Garret’s office sits along a far wall of the floor we occupy. We have to navigate a field of squat gray cubicles to reach it, then he opens the door and gestures me inside. He closes the door behind us, but that doesn’t mean much. Garret likes catching up with us after conferences and things, and he often keeps his door closed even when he’s alone.

“Have a seat,” he says as he takes his own behind his desk. “How was Nashville?”

He gets a very different version of events than what I regaled my co-workers with. The x-rated version is no secret to Garret; he was a rep himself before ascending into management. Still, I focus on clients, sales, panels I attended, stuff like that. All the boring things. The stuff that’s actually part of the job.

Garret nods along as I give him the run-down, interrupting with an occasional question. When I’m done, he sits back in his chair with a sigh and folds his hands on his desk.

“You’re good at this, Julian,” he says. “Really good at it. You always come back with the most leads of anyone in this office.”

I smile crookedly. “Natural talent. What can I say?”

“Whatever you want to call it, it’s working. Upper management has noticed.”

My eyebrows flicker up involuntarily at this. I’ve never aspired to much in this company. I’m happy enough with my job and my pay. I certainly wouldn’t want to be confined to the office all the time like Garret, so upper management has rarely crossed my mind.

“I’m … grateful,” I say.

Garret chuckles. “Relax. You’re not getting stuck in the office any time soon. I told them as much myself. You’re too good out in the field for us to lose to office work.”

I relax into my chair, tension draining from my shoulders.

“But there is another conference coming up,” Garret says. “I know you just got home,” he adds quickly, “but this is a big one. It could open us up to a completely different market, and I want my best rep on it. That’s you, Julian. If you aren’t up for it because of your recent trip, I understand, but you’ll have earned yourself a big vacation and bonus if you pull this one off.”

I don’t really need the money, and I have no idea what I’d do with a vacation except visit my mom down in New Jersey. No, the actual reason I perk up from this offer is because I genuinely enjoy these stupid, degenerate trips. They’re my natural environment. Moreover, they cocoon me in the kind of energy and attention that insulates me from the loneliness of the empty apartment waiting for me in Manhattan.

“I could be convinced,” I say carefully.

“You know we’ve been looking at breaking into tech for a while now,” Garret says. “If we could sell to those guys, there’s potential for VC money. It could be huge. We get the right partnership with the right company, hell, even a startup, it could skyrocket our profits. Not just for the quarter, either. We’re looking at year over year growth. It’s a huge opportunity.”

“Uh huh, yeah, I remember.”

“So, Seattle.”

The word drops like a hammer. Seattle. Where Cameron lives. Of course it’s Seattle. Of course it’s not Silicon Valley. Why shouldn’t fate bend this way? The universe has some sense of humor.

“Seattle?” I say.

“It’s not Silicon Valley, but Facebook, Google, Amazon — they’re all out there. This is going to be huge. I want you to get in there and make connections with anyone you can. Sell them on the merger of tech and health. It’s the next big innovation. It’s the thing both industries have been waiting for. All that shit. You know the script.”

I do, but the script doesn’t usually include being in proximity to the one person in my life who I’ve always felt like I let slip away before we had a chance.

The rest of Garret’s instructions sail past me. My brain is churning over the possibilities. Where exactly does Cameron live? Seattle is a big place. What is he doing out there? Will Henry know? Maybe Cameron’s not even there anymore. Maybe he’s unreachable. I haven’t texted him in years. Would he respond if I tried? Has he blocked my number? Maybe he’s been waiting all these years for me to reach out to him, pining in silence, dreaming of the day we’d be together again. Okay, that one sounds far-fetched, but what can I say? I’m a bit of a romantic at heart.

There are too many possibilities to count, but by the time I leave Garret’s office, I nearly skip back to my desk. My smile isn’t plastered on this time around. This thing singing in my chest isn’t the fake cheer I smear on to charm a client or co-worker. I’m going to be near Cameron again. Only for a week and only for work, but that’s better than I’ve had in years. Surely, he can’t be holding on to his hatred of me after all these years. It must have passed by now. Our moms aren’t even together anymore. There’s nothing to keep us from being best buds — and perhaps even more than that.

Yeah, definitely.

I don’t bother to pretend I’m answering emails when I get back to my desk. I hunch over my personal (not work) phone and start texting Henry. If anyone will know where Cameron is, it’s him.

If fate is kind, I’ll be seeing my brother-not-brother again very, very soon.