Proximity | Escalate Ep. 4: Adherence

In the last episode of Escalate, Ben starts taking action on the mysterious email and photos taken in front of Julian Sloane’s restaurant. He meets Everett at his townhouse where Everett learns Ben’s been talking to others about their relationship, adding to Everett’s growing unease. Then at the Whitmore University Club with Penelope Stuart, Kane’s wife and crisis communications specialist, assesses the threat and reframes the stakes.

EVERETT POV

Penelope Stuart walks Ben and Everett up to the third floor of the Whitmore Club to a private dining room that her husband, Kane Stuart has reserved for his meeting with Ben. When they enter the paneled room, Everett’s first thought on seeing the table laid out in front of Kane is that he’s not eating breakfast, he’s loading.

Four eggs, a steak and breakfast potatoes. In two flat bowls are half a grapefruit and a mound of cottage cheese with three kinds of berries. Next to that are two English muffins in a toast rack. Another plate holds french toast, butter but no syrup. Kane works through all of it at a steady mechanical pace with his eyes on a newspaper folded down to a square the size of a coaster. There’s no visible pleasure in Kane’s face as he consumes, and it’s the same expression Everett has seen on him when he’s doing squats under two hundred-seventy pounds at the gym.

“Jesus, Kane,” says Ben, laughing.

“I’ve been up since four.” Kane doesn’t look up. “This is my first meal and probably my last before the end of the day. They’ll have lunch brought in for the GIYN meeting, sandwiches and salads, but I never eat during those meetings.”

“Where do you put all that?” Everett asks, though he already knows.

“I metabolize aggressively.”

“He does,” Penelope says. “It’s his one flaw.”

She drops an earthy brown-colored Delvaux bag, which must be her briefcase, onto a side chair, then circles the table to stand behind her husband. She places her hands on his shoulders and kisses the top of his head, so Kane stops chewing, tips his head back and smiles up at her. And for about a second and a half Kane is a different man entirely. Then it’s gone and his focus is back on the food.

Everett has met Kane at the gym twice a week for a year and a half, but he understands Kane’s whole architecture now after witnessing this refueling process. Up at four, gym, consume a day’s worth of calories before nine so he can power through work for the entire day. No wasted motion anywhere in his schedule, including with food. It’s just how Kane Stuart happens to be engineered.

And Everett approves. It’s how he runs his own days, more or less, and he suspects for similar reasons.

Penelope straightens up from her husband’s shoulder and turns, and Everett watches her decide to say something.

“Everett. One of the calls I made while you and Ben were in the locker room jogged something loose for me.” She walks around the table and stops next to the chair where she dropped her bag. “You run a cybersecurity firm.”

“I do.”

“So you can get me a name off that email.”

“No.” He makes that one-syllable word sound longer than it should.

That causes Penelope to pause, but Everett expects it because Penelope is a professional and Everett knows she prefers blunt honesty rather than something fuzzy.

“I can read the headers, and I will. But it came from a Gmail account sent in a browser, and Google stopped putting originating addresses in those headers for something like ten years now. What I’ll get is Google’s mail servers and a routing chain that could belong to anyone on the planet. It won’t be nothing, but it won’t be the sender.”

“What about the photographs?”

“They’re somewhat better because attachments don’t get scrubbed the way messages do. So there may be metadata sitting in the files. That may tell us what the photographer shot with, at what time and at what focal length. It tells us about the tools and techniques of the photographer but it won’t tell us the photographer’s name.”

Penelope’s eyes have narrowed slightly and that’s when Everett realizes her listening mannerisms are the mirror image of Kane’s. Or maybe it’s Kane who mirrors Penelope.

“And so to get the sender’s name… ?”

“The sender’s name is inside Google, and Google only gives that information up with a court order and nothing less. Getting a court order means filing suit against an unnamed defendant. And that’s a public docket with Ben’s name on it… and mine, and a description of what’s in the photographs. The remedy actually publishes the thing you are being hired to bury.” He pauses then to let Penelope absorb that.

Ben and Kane have both stopped moving and neither emit a sound.

“That’s exactly right,” Penelope says after a beat, “and it’s a relief to hear it from you and to confirm my suspicions.” She picks the bag up from the chair and puts it over her shoulder. “So here’s what I would like. Look at the technical layer. The headers, files, and whatever’s in them. Send me what you find, all of it. Even the pieces you think are useless. Especially those, in fact. And then do nothing else with it. Don’t call anybody about it, don’t email anyone, don’t approach a name if a name turns up. Whatever you find comes to me and I decide where it goes from there.”

“Why,” asks Ben. “Everett knows what he’s doing.”

“Everett’s technical understanding is not in question, Ben. The answer to your question why is because you’re the subject.” There is no softness in her tone. “You and Everett are the two people on earth who cannot be seen looking into this. As we discussed, the second either of you touches it, you’ve confirmed to whoever’s holding those pictures that they’re worth something. I can ask questions all day long because nobody has any idea who I am to it.”

Everett knows she’s right. It’s clean, it’s correct, and it’s exactly what he would tell a client if the tables were turned.

“Do I have your word?” she says to Everett, and then to Ben.

“You have my word,” Everett says.

“You have my word,” echoes Ben.

“Good.” And then Penelope smiles at Ben first and then Everett, and it’s warm, and it undoes roughly half the steel of the last two minutes. “Leave it with me,” she says.

Then she turns to Kane and says: “Okay, I’m off. I’ve got two calls and the owner of an email to track down.”

“Alright, Pen,” says Kane.

She goes back behind the table, kisses the top of Kane’s head again and squeezes his shoulder. “Goodbye, my love. Have a wonderful day.”

Then she moves to Ben, kisses him on both cheeks, and after that, takes two steps and stops in front of Everett. She lightly puts her hand on his upper arm and smiles at him, and it’s soft and genuine.

“I’m glad it’s you in this with him, for what it’s worth,” she says. And with that, Penelope Stuart turns and leaves through the solid oak door and closes it behind her.

Everett looks over at Ben who is present but expressionless. Kane breaks the silence a few seconds later when he clears his throat. Both men look at him as he wipes his mouth on a linen napkin, then his hands, and stands up.

“Hi Everett.”

“Hello, Kane.”

Everett walks over to the table and Kane’s eyes go over him once, up and back, and hold on his face. Everett holds Kane’s look, and with the exception of a hint of a smile on both of their mouths, they shake hands and there is no show of emotion and nothing whatsoever crosses either man’s face. Then Everett nods once at Kane and Kane returns it. They release hands and Kane sits back down at the table.

And that’s all of it. Kane Stuart found out yesterday that the man he trusts to run cybersecurity for his multibillion dollar financial advisory firm, and who spots him on bench press and squat rack at the gym at least twice a week, is sleeping with his largest client who also happens to be a man. And Kane has accepted it with grace and without a single word. He shook Everett’s hand and looked him in the eye for two seconds longer than the handshake required, and that is the entire conversation they will have about it.

It occurs to Everett in that singular moment that Kane Stuart is one of the few men he would call a friend. This strikes Everett as odd, but at the same time, friendship hasn’t been a top priority since his wife passed ten years earlier.

If he stopped to take inventory, who could he really count as a friend? He’s close to Henry David, his COO, but Henry works for him and their relationship is purely professional. And besides, Henry has four kids and that is completely out of sync with where Everett is in his life.

There are the guys from Everett’s days as a competitive bodybuilder, many of whom are still gym buddies. They’re around and he sees them regularly. But Everett can count on one hand the number of times he’s gone anywhere with any of them outside of the gym or a bodybuilding competition.

He’d originally met Kane at the gym too. After months of seeing Kane there religiously working out, Everett approached him and asked if he needed a spot on a particularly heavy set he was doing on the incline bench. Since that day he and Kane have been working out together at least twice a week and that’s how he knows which days are Kane’s shoulder days and which are his chest days. It’s also why he knows how much Kane can bench and what his max is on the leg press. Despite those stats and more, he has no idea whether Kane wants children or how he met Penelope or whether he has any siblings. He’s sure Kane could say the same about him.

That’s the shape of my life these days.

That is what Everett thinks as he stands watching Kane resume eating his breakfast.

At least he has Penelope…

Like Everett had Clare. And then he had a decade of not having anybody, so he filled those years with work and with iron, both of which will take everything you put into them and never ask you a single question about yourself. This is a strange and slightly grim reality for a forty-five year-old man to realize at nine-thirty in the morning in a private club where he is not a member.

And then there’s Ben.

It was so hard to believe that Ben had entered Everett’s life only two short months ago. After being in close proximity for just a few weeks, Everett came to the realization that Ben had reintroduced something into his life that had been missing for a long time. And that was the simple enjoyment of being in the company of someone he liked to spend time with. Ben brought laughter, conversation and curiosity back into Everett’s world and provided the easy rhythm that comes with companionship through shared interests. Ben brought something back into Everett’s life that had mattered enough to Everett that he took things to the next level. Ben brought friendship. Ben was Everett’s best friend.

That’s the thought that snaps him back to reality.

“Sit down and eat something,” Kane says. “Both of you. Keegan’s here in a few minutes.”

“I’ve got to get out to the job I’m doing on Long Island. Data breach.” Everett reaches to button his sport coat. “I’m three hours late as it is.”

Then Ben has his phone out and before Everett realizes what’s happening Ben is talking into it. “Michael, would you please take Everett out to a meeting he has on Long Island. He’ll give you the address.” A pause. “Thanks, and let me know when you’re back in the city.”

“Ben, no.”

“It’s an hour and a half on the train and you’re three hours late already. Michael would just be sitting in the car somewhere nearby otherwise.”

“Okay, then I’ll take the train home tonight. Or Henry David can run me back in.”

He turns to Kane. “Good to see you, Kane. I’m sure I’ll see you soon.”

“I look forward to it, Everett.”

He turns to Ben, standing there in that green sweater with a whole day in front of him wearing it, and Everett has to make a decision in about a second and a half.

Everything he said in that locker room, he meant. All of it. But it was aimed at a photograph and a sidewalk and a deadline, not at Ben. And if Everett walks out of here without correcting the trajectory of that, then Ben will carry the incorrect version of it around with him all day. Ben reads everybody but for some reason Ben cannot read him, which Everett has sensed this for about a month now. Something like this could jam his radar even more.

So Everett does something unplanned but he believes is necessary in the moment. He puts a hand on Ben’s arm above the elbow and squeezes once, then pulls Ben in close, and hugs him. It’s quick and nothing like the one outside Julian’s on Wednesday night, but it’s a hug. And in front of Kane.

“I’ll see you tonight,” he says. And as he turns to go he sees a look on Ben’s face that Everett has never seen on the man who reads everyone, and it can only be described as utter confusion.

Michael has the Denali in front of the Whitmore and is around the car to get the door before Everett even reaches for it. Michael is tall and solidly built, with light brown hair that’s coming in grey at the temples, even though he’s probably not forty yet. He’s driven Everett maybe a dozen times now, most of them back to Perry Street late at night, and he has never once asked a question or offered an opinion. Everett appreciates that but still feels a little funny about it.

The car pokes into the slow moving flow of traffic inching westward on East 45th Street, and Everett sits back.

Then he takes the lid off.

Because Everett is nowhere near finished being pissed off at Ben Langley. Not even remotely. He pushed it down for almost ninety minutes because there was a professional in the room and a deadline at three o’clock to worry about. That’s what you do with an incident in progress. You work the incident and you deal with any drama later. Later is now, and there’s drama. A lot of it.

Someone stood across the street from Julian’s restaurant in the Meatpacking District on Wednesday night, and photographed him with his arms wrapped tightly around Ben. And worse, with his face buried in Ben’s neck because Everett had been crying.

Ben Langley had asked Everett for help and Ben Langley never asks anyone for help. What’s more, nobody has needed Everett for that sort of help in at least a decade. He hadn’t understood how much being needed had mattered to him until Ben put his hand out on Gansevoort Street asking for help.

That’s the thing that had left Everett gutted, because it’s the thing that’s on some hard drive somewhere. Not two men embracing. But a ten year defensive system coming apart because of him being wanted by someone who doesn’t want anything from anybody.

Even still, Ben knew about those pictures for eighteen hours before Everett did and that’s the thing that really gets his hackles up. And then before that, Ben told Kane. Kane knew about the two of them before Everett even knew Kane knew.

Ben decided that, dammit.

Ben sat in Kane’s office and decided who got to know Everett Shaw’s private business and then showed up in Everett’s kitchen this morning and reported the decision.

So Kane knows. And now Penelope knows too. Does Avery know? Maybe. Probably.

Everett liked Avery the second he met her, and now he cannot be sure whether the warmth on Wednesday was a woman meeting her brother’s friend or a woman already fully briefed and being gracious about it. Maybe Ben will tell him. Or maybe he won’t, and then Everett will never know. He isn’t going to ask.

On top of it, a brilliant crisis comms specialist he met only a day and a half ago just explained to him, kindly, in a room full of hundred-year-old books, that he is the exposure risk. Not Ben. Him. At risk is the company with his name on the door and a client list that doesn’t like surprises. Plus he was told he has no practice at being in the limelight.

Everett works his fingers into his beard and twists a piece of it near the jaw, which is a thing he does when he wants to hit something and can't.

She’s wrong about the last part. He knows exactly what it is to be the center of attention. He spent seven years walking onto stages in front of judges in nothing but skimpy posing trunks and body oil. From the age of thirty-five to forty-two, Junior Masters and then Masters, he was looked at, watched and evaluated. He has a whole credenza at home full of silver and brass to show for his efforts.

But he chose to be in that spotlight. He’d trained over years and fasted for months to step out under the lights on his own schedule, and then step away when he was done with it. The looking stopped the minute he decided it stopped.

That’s the whole difference from what’s happening now. He didn’t choose what’s happening now and he can’t schedule it, nor can he step off it.

He gets his phone out as Michael turns the Denali onto Fifth Avenue.

The headers give him what he told Penelope they’d give him, which is nothing. He has to look anyway, because you always have to look, and his phone is enough for a first pass.

The attachments are better because they hold more data. He forwards them to himself so he isn’t working off a preview, and he learns the sender left more in the files than he should have. A phone wasn’t used. A camera body, real glass, a focal length that changes between the fourth frame and the fifth. And timestamps, which are the thing that matters, because the frames span nine minutes and forty seconds.

Nine minutes and forty seconds.

Whoever took the images was in position and waiting well before they came out that door.

And there was one more thing he hadn’t mentioned to Penelope. At the bottom of the message is a single transparent image pulled from a server that isn’t Google’s. It’s a pixel. Standard commercial tracking, the same kind every marketing department on earth uses, and it does exactly one thing. It tells the sender when the message was opened, and how often.

Ben opened it at four-forty yesterday afternoon. And again at five-ten. And again at six, and at eight-fifteen, and twice more after midnight. Seven times. Ben sat alone in his loft and opened it seven times. And whoever sent it watched him do it, every single time.

Dammit, I’ll have to sit with that for now.

He sends the whole file then to Penelope, as promised, and puts the technical layer down. It took him eleven minutes and it will never produce a name. Which leaves the physical layer. And the physical layer is where he’ll have the best luck finding the sender.

There are cameras on Gansevoort Street, Everett is sure of it. There are cameras everywhere in New York these days. There will be cameras on the top of the buildings on either side of Julian’s restaurant and on the building across the street. They will be above the loading bay two doors down, and the doorway tucked between planter boxes diagonally across from Soroa’s front door. Then there are the restaurant’s own exterior coverage, which are the ones that matter, because they point at the exact stretch of sidewalk where he and Ben had been standing.

Soroa’s cameras are Julian Sloane’s cameras.

Everett’s not sure if that’s a good thing or bad thing. He shifts in the seat and watches Queens start to open up outside the window.

Route it through me, Penelope said, and he’d said yes, and he did as she asked. But it’s his face in the photographs. He’s the one whose company has his name on the door. He’s the one who was crying on a sidewalk into a large man’s shoulder on a Wednesday night. Nobody else is going to look at those images and feel the way Everett feels.

He’ll go to Julian himself. Quietly, for some reason that sounds like nothing. He’ll make something up and ask for the exterior footage from Wednesday night as a favor. One businessman to another, and then he’ll watch it himself.

And he isn’t going to mention any of it to Ben, because Ben has plenty on his plate and an unsuspecting father to face tomorrow. No version of this gets better by Ben knowing anything about it tonight.

The Denali drops into the Midtown Tunnel and the tiled walls come up close on both sides, and Everett looks at his own reflection sitting there in his black sweater vest. That’s when the anger wears itself down to something quieter, and what comes up underneath it is worse, because it’s the reason any of this hurts.

Two weeks ago they’d been back up to the cabin. The heat was beyond unreasonable for spring so they’d paddled out to the island, their island, after lunch to lay in the shade and try to cool off. After dragging the kayaks up onto the little beach, Ben had looked at the water and then back to Everett with a look that was a simple preview of what was going to come next. He’d stripped down to nothing at all, because there was no one within two miles and Ben Langley has never been remotely shy about showing off his body.

Everett watched Ben peel off his GIYN performance tee shirt and shorts, then the jock, releasing the substantial cock Everett was now as familiar with as his own. He had wanted to take Ben right then and there, but Ben had retreated to the safety of the lake and the cold hit them both so hard they hollered and grabbed themselves, laughing like they were twelve years old again.

They swam for a bit and at one point Ben disappeared under the water, long enough for Everett to start to feel a panic rising from his gut into his chest. He was calling Ben’s name and was ready to dive below in search of him which was about the time Ben finally broke the surface with a gasp. His thick hair was pushed back and the lake was running off his heavily muscled shoulders, through the dark hair on his chest, and he was grinning at Everett like an idiot kid.

“What the fuck, Ben… I’m gonna fucking kill you,” Everett had yelled. “You scared the shit out of me.”

He was definitely mad at Ben that day, not nearly as mad as he is today though. Because in the next instance the anger vanished and Everett grabbed him and kissed him. It was sloppy and they were laughing and Everett had never been happier to see him.

After that, they’d taken turns fucking each other over the back of the old green kayak because Everett was worried the cheaply constructed newer one wouldn’t handle the five hundred pounds of force their two large bodies would generate as they pounded one another.

This is the stuff that Everett keeps circling back to. Not the sex, but dammit Ben feeds something in him he never knew existed. It’s the two of them being ridiculous. It’s the hollering in the lake and the joy of laughing and being present with someone and acting like neither of them have a care in the world. It had been a long time before Ben that anyone had gotten that out of Everett and it’s out now and Everett embraces it.

But Everett is also tired. Tired of the confusion and the waffling and not having an answer he can comfortably live with. It’s too new, it’s too foreign.

Everett was married for ten years to a woman he loved and then buried. He’s spent his entire adult life among large men, in gyms and locker rooms, and backstage at competitions where everybody is oiled and half naked and nobody thinks anything of it, and not once, not at nineteen, not at thirty, not at forty, did he look at any of them and want a single thing.

He wasn’t hiding it. There was nothing to hide. He has run the tape and there is no earlier version of this to find or access. So what is it about this guy?

Maybe it’s proximity.

You put two people in a small space for a few weeks with no one else around and something forms. That’s just how people work and sometimes people get attached to whoever is standing there

Maybe it’s grief.

Ten years alone and the first person who got through happened to be a man, and it could have been anybody.

Maybe it’s the gravity.

That thing about Ben that pulls everyone into his orbit. Everett is no more immune than the hostess who winked at him at Julian Sloane’s restaurant or Julian Sloane himself.

But none of it holds. Proximity doesn’t explain why Everett wanted Ben in the second week. Grief doesn’t explain why it’s Ben specifically and no one before him. And gravity is the theory Everett wants least of all, because gravity would make him one more object in the field, and whatever this is, he has never once felt like that.

Nor is this a sudden awakening to a new sexual orientation, and that’s the hardest thing to grasp. Everett doesn’t look at other men. His eyes don’t wander down the street. And Clare wasn’t a cover story. He wanted his wife for ten years and there was nothing false in it.

It’s him. It’s Ben Langley. It’s the scent of his skin and the roughness of the scruff on his jaw. It’s the heavy bulk of him and the very masculinity that should spark hesitation but is actually the anchor that grounds Everett to him. It’s how he looks at Everett when Everett speaks to him, with his entire, undivided presence, and the calm, spacious patience he allows Everett to take his time and unburden himself without the fear of being judged or rejected.

Everett built his life on not needing anyone since Clare. Loving Ben means letting that go, and what unnerves him isn’t Ben’s size or force or intelligence, it’s the plain fact of needing someone again after ten years of managing without. He’s not being overtaken. He’s being met by a man who matches him, and being met is the thing he has no defenses for.

The tunnel gives up then and the light floods back hard and white off the windshields into Queens.

And none of it changes one thing about this morning. Everett drags a hand down through his beard and closes his fist at the end of it, and holds it there.

Because in five weeks Ben has never once mentioned what it costs to stand next to him. Not a word about what a room does when Ben Langley walks into it, or what happens to whoever’s beside him when it does. It would have been good to know.

Because somebody took a picture of my face in Ben’s neck and Ben sat on it for eighteen hours. Sure he tried to call once but something like this would have warranted another call… but he backed off and all while the clock was ticking.

Because Kane Stuart knows about my relationship with Ben and knows about the email with those pictures before I even knew there was anything for me to learn.

Ben’s decision to tell Kane about them might be the thing that hits Everett the hardest.

Everett’s crazy about Ben. He aches for Ben when they are not together and dreams about Ben at night, even if they’re sleeping in the same bed next to each other. None of that’s in question and hasn’t been. But Everett is also on the Long Island Expressway coming from a meeting about a mysterious email and crisis comms plan with a woman who knows about his private life along with her husband and possibly more people, and that is why he’s more furious at Ben Langley than he has been at anybody since Clare died.

Two truths, both sitting in the same chest. And he never said any of it out loud this morning.

Then his phone buzzes.

Ben | Michael texted that you’re on your way. Thank you for coming this morning. Tonight, 7:30. Don’t bring anything.

Everett looks at it for a while.

Everett | Wouldn’t miss it.

Then deletes it. Then types:

Everett | We need to finish this morning’s conversation.

He deletes that too, because it’s true and it’s the wrong thing to send a man who has a meeting with his family’s fifty-billion-dollar company in less than an hour.

What Everett wants to type is that he loves Ben. He’s wanted to type it or say for awhile. Three times in as many days it’s been on the tip of his tongue. But he hasn’t typed or said anything, because he doesn’t know if it’s too soon for a thing like that, and because he doesn’t know what those words may have cost Ben in the past. Or what it may cost Everett in the future.

Everett | 7:30. See you then.

Then he puts the phone face-down on the seat beside him, and does not feel one bit better.

To be continued…