Page 6 of Play Hard

Thirty minutes later, Robert was still awake, opening a browser on his phone.

The Workaholics Anonymous website contained a list of unhelpful questions:

Do you take work with you to bed?

Well, yeah. Liam’s living room is freezing.

Do you avoid intimacy with others and/or yourself?

Robert smirked at the memory of what he and Liam had just done. Definitely not.

Do you fear success, failure, criticism, burnout, financial insecurity, or not having enough time?

So you’re basically asking, “Are you a human or a robot?”

Do you feel like a slave to your email, texts, or other technology?

Seriously? Have you even met people of the twenty-first century?

Robert switched off his phone with a sigh. Based on these questions, nearly everyone he knew was a workaholic.

Not Liam, though. For him, work was a means to an end. He was good at his job—the customers at Hannigan’s loved him, and he rarely got rattled when the pub was crammed out during a Celtic match—but he never worked a minute longer than necessary, though he desperately needed the money. As for Liam’s potential career as a massage therapist, Robert often wondered which of them was more excited about the idea: Liam or himself.

For Robert, as an entrepreneur, work was life. He was his work. If he couldn’t make the Glasgow Effect app a success and he had to take a job with some random company, he’d…well, he probably wouldn’t be bringing his laptop to bed. But he also wouldn’t be happy.

It mattered that his work served a higher purpose. Being devoted to it couldn’t be a bad thing, right?

Still, he could do better, he admitted as he returned his phone to the bedside table, then nestled against his softly snoring boyfriend. Work could so easily take over his life, crowding out his two great loves: Liam and football. They would slip from his grasp unnoticed, and before he knew it, they’d be gone.

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