A minute later, Riggs’s face smelled of vodka and watermelon, and Elise was two hundred bucks richer. Riggs dutifully got called out for leaving his date waiting. Blondie stalked off with an angry huff back to her friends, and Riggs made his way to the bar, half-amused, half-pissed.
“Jerk.” Riggs grabbed the hem of my blazer and used it to wipe off his face.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“Penicillin was first called mold juice. I bet you didn’t know that. I didn’t, either, until last month, when I sat on a flight to Zimbabwe next to a very nice bacteriologist named Mary.” Riggs grabbed my beer, downing the whole thing and then clucking his tongue. “Spoiler alert: Mary was no virgin between the sheets.”
“You mean in the lavatory.” Arsène made a disgusted face.
Riggs let out a roar of a laugh. “Need some pearls to clutch, Corbin?”
That was the other thing about Riggs. He was a nomad, drinking other people’s drinks, crashing on their couches, flying economy like a heathen. He had no roots, no home, no responsibilities outside of his job. At twenty-two, it had been tolerable. At thirty-two, it was skirting the edge of pitiful.
“Which reminds me: Where are you off to tomorrow?” I snatched the empty beer before he could start licking the damn thing.
“Karakoram, Pakistan.”
“Ran out of places to visit in America?”
“About seven years ago.” He grinned good-naturedly.
Riggs was a contributing photographer for the National Geographic and a few other political and nature magazines. He’d won a bunch of awards and visited most countries in the world. Anything to run away from what was—or wasn’t—waiting for him at home.
“How long will you be gracing us with your lack of presence?” Arsène asked.
Riggs kicked back his stool, balancing it on two legs. “A month? Maybe two? I’m hoping to get another assignment and fly straight from there. Nepal. Maybe Iceland. Who knows?”
Not you, that’s for damn sure, you industrial-refrigerator-size baby.
“Christian asked Daddy and Daddy for a promotion today and got denied.” Arsène filled Riggs in, his voice monotone. I picked up his Japanese beer and downed it.
“Yeah?” Riggs clapped my shoulder. “Maybe it’s a sign.”
“That I suck at my job?” I asked pleasantly.
“That it’s time to slow down and realize there’s more to life than just work. You’ve made it. You’re in no real danger of becoming poor again. Let it go.”
Easier said than done. Poor Nicky was always going to live inside of me, eating two-day-old kasha, reminding me Hunts Point was just a handful of bus stops and mistakes away.
I elbowed Riggs’s ribs. His stool snapped back into place. He laughed. “And it’s not that I didn’t get it,” I said, setting the record straight. “They want me to give them a show-off case. A big win.”
Arsène tossed me a cruel smirk. “And here I thought things like that only happened in movies with Jennifer Lopez.”
“Cromwell just pulled it out of his rectum to buy time. Jumping through one more hoop won’t make a difference. The partnership is mine.”
Cromwell & Traurig wasn’t more than a pile of bricks and legal-size papers on Madison Avenue without me. But it still had that shine as Manhattan’s best white-shoe firm, and leaving it for a partnership, even one in the second-biggest firm in the city, would raise questions, as well as eyebrows.
“I’m so happy the wrong-side-of-the-tracks syndrome isn’t contagious.” Riggs flagged down Elise again, ordering another round. “It must be exhausting to be you. You’re determined to conquer the world, even if you have to burn it down in the process.”
“No one’ll get burned if I get what I want,” I said.
They both shook their heads in unison. Riggs looked at me with visible pity.
“This is what you’re designed to do, Christian. Let your demons run free and wild and see where they take you. This is why we’re friends.” Riggs patted my back. “Just remember, to become king, you must dethrone someone first.”
I sat back in my stool.
Heads would roll, all right. But none of them were going to be mine.
CHAPTER THREE
CHRISTIAN
Present
My opportunity to prove I was partnerworthy presented itself the following Monday, wrapped in a red satin bow, just waiting for me to unwrap it.
It was godsent. If I were a believing man, which I had absolutely no reason to be, I would have given up something for Lent to show my appreciation to the big man above. Not anything critical, like sex or meat, but maybe my wine-club subscription. I was more of a scotch man, anyway.
“There’s someone here to see you,” Claire, a junior associate, announced. I could see her in my periphery, tapping my office door, a thick manila file pressed to her chest.
“Do I look like I accept walk-ins?” I asked, not lifting my gaze from the papers I was inspecting.
“No, which was why I sent her on her way, but then she told me what made her come here, and well, now I feel like you should definitely swallow your pride and hear her out.”