And yet, at my core, the same issue that vexed me then vexes me now.

There’s not a man on earth more tightly bound by expectations than I am. I never was able to escape that feeling even when my passion for pleasing my father morphed into passion for growing GHV. I love the company outside of him, but still, there is no doubt I am chained to it in ways other men aren’t. I’ve learned to live with it, to compensate for it in a multitude of unhealthy ways.

In any area of my life where I’m allowed freedom, I go overboard.

Take relationships, for instance: commitment makes my skin crawl. The idea of someone owning my time outside of the office is enough to make me want to delete every female contact from my phone. I’ll be damned if anyone other than my fucking father is going to make demands of me.

I also travel a lot. I enjoy the life of a jet-setter. I keep a home in Paris, another in London, one in New York, and now here, in Boston. I only arrived in the city three weeks ago, but in that time I’ve worked with a broker to purchase a turn-key property downtown, walking distance from GHV’s future headquarters. Unfortunately, it didn’t come furnished. Or rather, it did, but the furniture didn’t suit me. I had everything removed, and I’m working with a team from Pierce Waterhouse to hopefully make it livable within the next month. Oh sure, they told me lead times were well over six months for the products they were trying to source for me, but I don’t live in a world where I have to wait for a single thing. Anything I want, money can buy. So, a few weeks it is. Until then, I’m in the penthouse at the Mandarin Oriental. It’s not ideal, but it gets the job done. They have a decent lap pool and gym, and so far, the service has been top-notch.

So it’s interesting, in some way, that Lainey has been able to capture my attention at all. The very fact that I’ve been taking time out of my schedule to look into her gallery, to come here tonight on the off chance she would be here is completely out of line. Sex is sex, and I’ve not been a good boy in the last twelve years since I left St. John’s, but I also don’t know what a crush feels like. The hallmarks of longing and infatuation are utterly lost on me. I used to make fun of my father’s assistant, Wilson, for acting like a cyborg, and now here I am, halfway there myself.

I’m musing over all of this and sipping my bourbon while the party continues on without me. It’s not until Collette comes to sit on the couch that I realize Jonathan left to go hunt down Emelia. It seems my old friend has a crush. Harrison, meanwhile, is passed out on a chair in the corner. Collette kicks her feet up to rest them on the coffee table in front of her and starts scrolling through her phone.