Alex.
“Dane is mostly out of the company now,” Alex said. “Ava’s baby is due next month, and when that happens he’ll be MIA for a while. Maybe a long time. Which leaves the three of us.” He took a sip of his drink. “You’ve never been as committed as Aidan and me. Aidan thinks I should take on more responsibility. He thinks that we should consider closing the Dallas office and moving me to New York.”
I blinked behind my sunglasses. I knew I was more disconnected than Aidan wanted me to be, but it still shook me that he hadn’t included me in this conversation. Did he think I really didn’t care?
“He wanted to get my take on it before he brought it up to you and Dane,” Alex said as if reading my mind. “He wanted to know if I would even be agreeable to it. If I did the move, we could consolidate Tower and simplify things. We’d have the New York base and the LA base, plus the office in Chicago to manage the Chicago project. We could focus on fewer projects and make them bigger. That’s the way Aidan sees it.”
Yeah, it was a fully thought-out plan, one that had never been mentioned to me. “And how do you see it?” I asked Alex.
“It’s a decent plan,” Alex said. “It makes sense in a lot of ways.”
And yet he was here, in L.A., talking to me instead of saying yes, and his dark eyes were scowling behind his sunglasses. “You don’t want to do it,” I said.
“It isn’t that I don’t want to do it. New York is fine. I’m not really attached to Dallas. The plan has logic to it.”
“Then spit it out, man. There’s something you hate about this. You know you can say it to me.”
Alex sighed and ran a hand through his hair. He was leaner than me, darker, and the tats made him look dangerous. They reflected the fact that he was the only one of us with a prison record. He’d done eighteen months of time when we were nineteen, after getting in a fight with his own brother and putting him in the hospital. That fight was one of the two things Alex never talked about. The other thing was his ex-wife, Kat, who he’d married after getting out of prison and divorced eight months later. I wasn’t the only one who had shit in his former life that he’d decided to bury and never think about again.
“It isn’t that I don’t like the idea,” Alex said. “But I’ve been thinking about something for a while.”
“Thinking about what?”
“Taking a vacation.”
I stared at him, surprised. “A vacation?”
“Yeah. You know, vacations? Those things none of us ever take? We’ve been working nonstop for over a decade, Noah. We’re all richer than we ever needed to be. I’ve been wondering lately why the hell we never take a break, never stop to enjoy life. And then I realized that you’ve had that mindset all along. You’re the only one of us who does take time off. And we’ve given you shit about it all this time, but now that I’m over thirty I’m realizing that you were the smart one all along. You were the only one of us with the right idea.”
I had no idea what to say to this. It was true—I got nonstop shit from the guys about being a flake, about not being serious. I’d never let it bother me, or so I thought. Hearing Alex say those words hit me by surprise in the gut, like part of me had wished to hear that for longer than I wanted to think about.
I cleared my throat. “I’m not sure you should be taking life advice from me, considering what a fuckup I am.”
“That’s just it, though,” Alex said. “I think the rest of us have actually fucked up more than you have. Life is short. If I kicked the bucket tomorrow, what would I have to show for it? A bunch of business deals, and that’s all.”
“You’ve been thinking some deep stuff.”
“I know. I must be getting old.” Alex shook his head and took a sip of his drink. “I don’t want to quit the business. And I know Aidan loves what he does, and if I left, it would be hard on him. But I need something. I want to start with a vacation. A real one. A long one. Not just a week on a beach