Page 39 of The Devil Wears Nada

THEO

Every morning, until this past week anyway, I bring her a coffee she never asked for. Oat milk, one sugar, just the way she takes it. Just the way she told me when she started here last year. Aside from that, Agnes and I have exchanged very few words, all of them about my calendar, my partners’ calendars, and the company calendar.

This woman, whom I barely talk to, the woman at the front desk in the shapeless beige cardigan, the one who's made herself so small you could walk past her and swear the chair was empty, is Diablo. Our Diablo. The one we pay a small fortune to watch online, the one Beck bought outright so no other man on earth could get a minute of her.

And she thinks we don't know. That's the engine the whole thing runs on. Every night, she puts on the red lipstick and turns into somebody bulletproof, somebody who could never be traced back to the girl who says good morning, Mr. Marsh to the side of my face, and she thinks she's gotten clean away with it. And every night, we let her think it. Three grown men sitting in three separate glowing screens, watching her believe she's invisible, and not one of us with the decency to tell her that we see her. That we've always seen her.

For Beck, it started as a game, the best game he'd found in years. For Elias, it's something older and locked that I've never had the code to. But I want to be honest about my own part, at least inside my own head, since it's the last place I've got any honesty left.

For me, it was never the website.

I didn't fall for Diablo. I fell for the woman who sees straight through everyone at that firm while letting them all believe there's nothing to her at all. I fell for the fact that she knows the night guard's kid by name and has never once mentioned it to score a point with anybody. I fell months before Elias ever opened that laptop, and the website handed me a door I'd been too much of a coward to knock on in the daylight. I found a way to be near her that didn't require any courage at all.

We're not speaking, the three of us guys. Twenty years of friendship, and we've never gone a week like this one. Elias has sealed himself in his office. Beck comes in late and comes in mean. I take my meetings off-site because I cannot sit at that table and pretend we're partners when what we actually are is three men who fell for the same woman and then knifed each other, quietly, one solo booking at a time, trying to have her alone.

So I try to fix it. That's my job in this partnership. Elias takes things apart, Beck builds them up, and I'm the one who keeps them from killing each other. Tonight, after the floor's gone dark and empty, I knock on Beck's door.

He's at his desk with the city lit up behind him and a drink he isn't touching. He doesn't look surprised to see me. He looks like he's been waiting for one of us to crack, and he's mildly let down that it was me rather than Elias, who will give him a real fight.

"Theo." He doesn't get up. "Come to hug it out?"

I shake my head and laugh. "Yeah, Beck. Exactly. I’ve come to figure out how we stop this before we lose twenty years and the firm over a—" I stop. I don't know what to call this.

"Over a what?" His smile isn't the good one, the one that closes rooms. "Go on. Say it. I want to hear which word you're hiding behind tonight."

"Beck."

"Here's where I've landed, as I see it," he says. He leans back, and his voice drops into the flat, reasonable register he uses right before he springs. "We stop pretending this is shared. It was never going to hold, three men, one woman, somebody was always going to want her all to himself. And hey, we all found that out the hard way, didn't we? So let’s make it simple. I buy her out. The whole thing. I make whatever money problem she has disappear like it was never there. And in exchange, she comes off the site, she stops taking strangers, and she belongs to this. To us."

"You mean to you."

"I mean to us." A pause, and then, because Beck can never resist the honest version once he's started. "But somebody's got to hold the leash. And it isn't going to be the hero who rescues damsels in distress.”

Leash.

He said leash. Out loud, in his board-meeting voice, about a woman. Not girl, not Diablo, not even Agnes. A leash.

Fucking asshole.

And the thing that's been crawling up my spine for weeks finally arrives and sits down. Beck isn't wrong. That's the part that guts me, standing here in his dark office. He's not wrong that one of us wants to own her. He's just the only one with the stomach to use the word for it. Elias wants to keep her somewhere locked, where nobody else can reach her. And I want to keep her safe and sound.

Three men. Three cages. Beck's is the only one with the hardware showing.

I came into that office to be the good one. The peacemaker. The voice of reason. And I walked out understanding that I'm just quieter than Beck about wanting the exact thing he says with his whole chest.

The one honest move left, the single thing, is to walk down to that front desk some morning, past the coffee and the calendar and the cardigan, and tell her we've known who she is the whole time.

I'm not brave enough for that. Not tonight.

But I can feel it coming the way you know a thing's going to break before it actually goes. Something in me is going to give. And when it does, it's going to bring all three of us down with it.

I can't get to sleep after my conversation with Beck, so I go back to the office at two in the morning. If I can't sleep, I may as well get some work done, and besides, some animal part of me needs to know where the other two guys are.

Beck I can understand now. He made his peace with the worst of what the three of us are. I won't. That's the difference between us. There's a calm that comes over a man once he stops fighting himself, and Beck knows that well. But the only way to get there is to shut off the part of you that knows right from wrong, and that’s not how I roll. Beck shut himself off. Not me, and I intend to keep it that way.

It's Elias who concerns me.

I think he's going to tell her. Walk down to that front desk, or type it into the chat some night, and come clean, that we've known exactly who she was from the beginning. And the second she hears that, we lose her. No fight, no scene, she just leaves. Quits the front desk, shuts down the account, walks out of all three of our lives, and not one of us ever sees her again. That's the thing I'm actually afraid of. Losing her for good.