“I’ll be comradely and drink with my friend, despite his foul mood,” the writer said, picking up the scotch and pouring it before the waiter could. “Now tell me your tale of woe, Trainor.”
“I came to drink, not talk.”
Gavin took a swallow of his drink. “You could have done that alone.”
“You said it was on you.” Nathan wasn’t ready to admit what was bothering him.
Gavin spun the bottle around so he could read the label. “You should have ordered more expensive scotch.” He waved the waiter over. “Take this away and bring a bottle of the Macallan, 1989. Unless Bill Gates has drunk it all already.”
“Are we celebrating the end of your writer’s block?” Nathan asked, having a rough idea of the price of the bottle Gavin had just ordered.
The writer threw him a sardonic glance. “If you’re going to drown your sorrows, you should do it with something worth the hangover.”
Nathan remembered how depressed he’d felt about work until he got back into the R and D lab. Being unable to write must feel something like that to Gavin. “Sorry.”
The other man shrugged. “I can live on my backlist royalties for the rest of my life, but other people are counting on this book.”
“You’re miserable without your creative outlet.”
“Aren’t we the sensitive psychoanalyst?” Gavin grimaced. “In order to need an outlet, I’d have to have some creativity left in me.”
“You think it’s not there, but it’s building up. If you don’t use it, you’ll have a core meltdown.” Nathan tossed back the last of his scotch as the waiter approached with a tray holding two tulip-shaped glasses, wide at the bottom and tapering to the top, and a simple clear bottle of dark-amber liquid with the year 1989 prominent on its label.
As the waiter reverently poured the single malt, Gavin said, “I appreciate the image of nuclear disaster, but I’m just a commercial hack. At worst, it would be a cherry bomb going off.”
The waiter placed the bottle on the table and stepped back. “I hope you’ll enjoy the Macallan, sirs.” Clearly he felt they weren’t paying such a rare beverage the attention it deserved.
Nathan picked up the glass and inhaled the heavy, complex scent. “Nice.” He took a sip and let it sit on his tongue, savoring the flavors of spice, nuts, and wood.
“You get a little bit of fruit at the finish,” Gavin said after swallowing his first taste.
Nathan drank the rest of the scotch in one gulp, just to be a bastard. He poured another and stared down into the dark-brown liquid glowing with red highlights. He could feel Gavin’s gaze on him.
“Quit stalling,” the other man said. “What’s got you abusing one of the world’s finest single malts?”
“My own stupidity.”
“That goes without saying.”
Nathan waited for more, but Gavin just took another sip of scotch. The whiskey burned through Nathan’s veins, loosening all the controls he’d put on his emotions. “Damn it, she chose the job over me.”
The writer sat up. “Chloe dumped you? Start at the beginning. This should be a good story.”
Nathan told him about the flu epidemic and Chloe’s abrupt promotion to executive assistant. “Ben basically forced her into coming to my apartment,” Nathan said. “She tried to say no every step of the way. She’s the strangest combination of ruthless determination and soft heart. The determination is all for her grandmother, so she kept negotiating more and more money every time I asked her to stay, but I think she only agreed to do it because she felt sorry for me in my sickly condition.”
“Sorry for you? Sure, I believe that,” Gavin said.
“You’ve met her. She wasn’t at all intimidated by me.” It had been the apartment and the cars and the jet that had bothered Chloe. Nathan, she’d treated as an equal. Until now.
“Well, she would have to be a criminal mastermind to have engineered a flu epidemic and then maneuvered her way into becoming your temporary assistant, so I’ll give you that. It sounds like she took full advantage of the situation, though.”
Nathan had accused her of opportunism too, but he shook his head. “She wouldn’t take anything of significance from me until I offered her the job.”
“We’re back to the job.”
Nathan drank a slug of single malt, letting it scorch down his throat. “I made sure she got a job at Trainor Electronics.”
“You are an idiot.”
The truth of that had smacked Nathan in the head a few hours earlier. “I hated having to snatch an hour here and there with her. I thought we could spend more time together if she worked in the same building.”
Gavin gave a long, low whistle. “You have swallowed the hook, line, and sinker, my friend.”
“She needed the job,” Nathan said. “She supports her grandmother, who’s having health issues.” He’d spoken with Ben earlier. His friend was nearly certain that Millie Russell’s problem was a simple and treatable heart arrhythmia. Relief had surged through Nathan at the news. He did have it bad.