I thought about telling him how thrilled I would have been if my own father had died, but I could tell that this wasn’t exactly the conversation for it. I handed him back his phone. “So, are you going to take over the company one day?”
“Me? No way,” he contended as he looked away. “I’m not cut out for that.”
“Why do you think that?” I replied, pushing back the reflexive frown that had settled on my face. I had only known Davis for half a day, but the conversations that we had put me in a state of calm that I hadn’t experienced around men before. Sure, I didn’t know much about business or what it took to run a company like Davenport-Ridgeway, but I did know that making people feel safe and at ease had to be a desirable leadership quality.
His expression tightened, almost like nobody had asked him that question before. “Well, I actually think I’d be good at it based on…talent, I guess. I know that sounds dickheaded, but I do have a surprisingly good business sense. Plus, I think this stuff is so interesting.”
“And you’re going to Wharton,” I reminded him, nudging him with my arm. “I could never do anything like that.”
“Why not?” he inquired, his tone suddenly sharp.
“Oh, come on. Me at a business school? Hanging out with guys in suits and…I don’t know…snorting coke? What happens at business school?”
“I mean, some of that, yeah. But it’s just a school. You take classes, do problem sets, find a job—whatever. You could do it.”
“I would be so out of my element.”
“Maybe you need to decide that you’re a person who goes to business school, and that’s who you’ll be.”
“It’s that simple?”
Davis chuckled again, his laugh boyish and light. “No, it’s hard. I barely do it—but I’m working on it.”
“You’re tailor-made for this.”
He forced a smile and I took a beat to admire how nice he looked when he did that. His face took on this bashful expression, like he wished he could hold back his grin. “I know. It’s just…” He trailed off again before he lowered his eyes to the tabletop. “I’ve got this anxiety thing that drives my dad crazy.”
“Anxiety?”
Davis nodded slowly, doing that thing where he was clearly deep in thought, choosing his words wisely. It seemed to be taking him longer than usual, until he finally shrugged his shoulders in a way that basically said fuck it. “I get nervous about things like speaking in public. Meeting new people. And negotiating. And drawing attention to myself. Basically everything. All things that you need if you’re going to run the largest holding company in the world.”
“I didn’t notice all of that,” I responded honestly. “You get nervous meeting new people?”
“You really didn’t see that my hands were trembling last night? Or that my heart was beating so fast…” The way he was looking at me made me feel like he was reliving that moment once again—like I was somehow special even if I simply couldn’t perceive it.
Lord, I had it bad. “I did, but I didn’t think it was because I made you nervous. I just thought you were fidgety.”
“Well I am fidgety, on top of being nervous.”
“It wasn’t that noticeable anyway. I was more focused on how wonderful it was to meet a guy who wanted to listen to me for once.”
Davis looked up at me again and his expression was all sweetness. “I could listen to you all day.”
In an attempt at distraction, I busied myself with my croissant. “Stop. Now you’re just flattering me.”
“If you knew me, you’d know that I’m incapable of flattery.” He looked away once more. “Anyway, I’ll probably end up working at the company one day, but Gray is going to run it. He’ll be CEO.”
“Does he deserve it?”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “He’s everything a leader is supposed to be. Confident, cutthroat, the whole nine yards.”
“And how do you know what a leader is supposed to be?” I inquired, even pushing back a little. “Is there a manual somewhere?”
“Sort of,” he replied, which I wasn’t expecting. “When I was a teenager, my dad gave me this list of great business habits and attributes that he had been collecting and writing since he was a kid. He said they were the secret to his success.”
At first, I thought he was kidding. There was no way this could be true—that 1) Davis’s father had been writing a weird business memoir since he was a child, and 2) that he would go so far as to give it to his teenage son. But the way that Davis stared at me seriously as he sipped his coffee told me that this absolutely was not a joke. This was real, psychopathic rich people shit. The kind of stuff that would have made F. Scott Fitzgerald himself perk up in his grave and say, “See? SEE? Didn’t I tell you all that money makes people do insane things?”
“That sounds like the shittiest gift in the world,” I finally declared.
His eyes widened momentarily before his expression relaxed. “Honestly? It kind of was. I thought I was getting a CD player and he gave me that. The worst part was, as I was reading it I didn’t think that anything I read in there was about me.”
“I’m morbidly curious about what he thinks success requires, and yet I know that I should avoid the torture.”
“I’ll give you the SparkNotes: It’s not me.”
I surveyed Davis briefly, wondering how much hurt was behind that comment. It’s not me. “Well, maybe you don’t have to be that exact version of success. Maybe you can be yourself and have that be good enough.”
He blinked a couple of times before he raised a shoulder. In those beats of silence, I wondered what was going through his head. “Maybe,” he responded, his voice sounding almost skeptical—and perhaps it was my naïveté about the business world that made me offer an idea so outlandish. “Maybe.”
“Hey!” A voice called out, startling both of us. We turned in the direction of the nearby canal, where Kieran was crossing the bridge.
Kieran was a leaner version of his brother, smaller all around, but more cut and shaped—like the kind of guy who clearly spent a lot of time working out. I didn’t care about things like that; being fit or being fat or being nothing at all. At no point in my life had food been reliable enough for me to care about the shape of my body, so I had no right to expect that from anyone else. But to each their own, I figured, and if Kieran Ridgeway wanted a body from Mount Olympus, that was his prerogative.
Where Kieran and Davis differed the most, however, was how they carried themselves. Kieran wanted to be looked at—that was clear. With every toss of his light hair and every brilliant smile he threw in all directions, it was obvious that he wanted to see and be seen. Davis was a shadow, on the other hand. But not a domineering one—no, he was more like a comforting presence in the vicinity, a buffer between me and everything else.
Their relationship wasn’t entirely clear to me. Davis had told me that Kieran was younger than he was, twenty—so actually closer in age to me. There was a dynamic between them that I couldn’t quite place. It was almost as though I should have expected Davis to be younger based on the way he spoke to Kieran. Even a few seconds later, when Kieran was pulling up a chair at our table, he helped himself to Davis’s croissant.
“Sure, go ahead,” Davis said facetiously as he watched Kieran take a healthy bite without hesitation.
“How was the museum?” Kieran asked, ignoring his brother altogether. “Good?”