Page 22 of Takeover
In the back corner of the room, he sat on a step stool tucked behind one of the equipment racks and nursed the start of what he suspected would become a very bad headache.
After some hard bargaining and quite a bit of raised voices, he and the board had struck a deal. They’d given Sam three weeks for testing, and the more experimental protocols would only be certified as beta released—full testing would not be needed. The rest of the features would be released for general availability.
Michael would not like it. Hell, Sam didn’t like it. He had done his best to carve out as much time as he could for the testing team, but there’d still be late hours and working weekends in their future. Sam rubbed his temples. He wasn’t ready to face Michael yet, especially the way their interactions had been of late.
Lately, Michael might as well be a ghost. He existed in the office and Sam caught glimpses, but they no longer spoke. Hell, most of the questions from the testing team came from people other than Michael.
That time in the shower had been a damn good fuck, but if he had known it would ruin the blossoming friendship, he’d never have asked. The look on Michael’s face in the end—after a slight hint that Sam felt something beyond physical attraction, Michael had run for the hills. Sam’s throat tightened. He should have known. Michael had made Sam’s place in his life very clear. Just a suit, a captain of industry to be bent over, beaten, and fucked for kicks.
That wasn’t entirely fair. Besides, had things continued… then what? A relationship meant stripping off the mask he’d worn since grad school, that of the prudish but probably straight man.
Sam shivered. Maybe that persona was already gone. The look William had given him—that comment…
No. William wasn’t that observant. It had more to do with Michael than with Sam—Michael whowasopenly gay.
Sam never thought he’d long for his undergraduate days, but in some ways, he’d been whole then—even though he could never keep a boyfriend and the whole four years had been one long, tumultuous fight with professors and students alike.
Then the night in the alley had happened and he’d done nothing. Sam shivered. Well, he’d made his choices. Paid his price, it seemed, too.
Certainly, the impending news from the board wouldn’t improve Michael’s opinion of him, even if there were any hope of a relationship.
That shit William. If he had his way, Sam would be the captain of a sinking boat. That slick smile and too-hard handshake at the end of the board meeting did not bode well. The man wanted Sam to fail, that much was obvious, but why? Why bring him here in the first place, if not to raise up Four Rivers like a phoenix from its burning pyre?
Maybe Taylor wasn’t the only one with sticky fingers in the cash jar. Sam sat up. Time to do a little research. See what William was into. Perhaps the way things with Michael had turned out was for the best, as well. Once Four Rivers was sold, he’d be off to a new struggling company. His nomadic life left little room for friendship, let alone anything beyond that—even if he hadn’t stuffed himself into the closet.
As Sam stood, the telltalebeep-clickof the security pad sounded from the door and Sam’s heart skipped a beat. For a moment, he felt like an errant child, caught hiding where he shouldn’t be; then his brain kicked in. He was the CEO and if he wanted to sit in the server room, he damn well could. He coughed and stepped out from behind the equipment rack.
Michael stood in front of the closing door, mouth parted, his glasses glinting in the florescent lights. The door clicked closed with a rattle of wood against metal.
“What are you doing here?” Michael said.
“I work here.” Sam deadpanned the words.
Michael exhaled, exasperation overtaking his surprise. “I meant what are you doing in this room? It’s not like you know anything about mail servers or routers.”
The words and the assumption—that Sam was technically incompetent—pelted like sleet on bare skin in winter. Heat, not the pleasant, enjoyable kind, rose in Sam’s chest and he had to force himself not to grit his teeth. “Actually, I started out in IT, managing a room not so different from this one.” He let that nugget sink in and enjoyed the coloring of Michael’s cheeks. “Why areyouhere?”
The muscle under Michael’s left eye twitched.
Sam slid a cool smile into place. “Crashed the router again?” He couldn’t help throwing that at Michael.
“I didn’t crash it. Development’s shitty build did. I’m here to do my job.” He moved, brushing past Sam to where one of the zone routers was racked. He pulled a keyboard out from behind a small monitor and banged on it. “God damn, even the console’s locked up.”
Not good.
As part of testing, they ran different parts of the office network through Four Rivers’ equipment—and woe if a zone went down, since Michael heard about it from fellow coworkers. Immediately.
The lights were illuminated on the router, but several of them were red.
“I really don’t like doing this.” Michael stared at the box for a moment, then pushed the power switch to off.
Sam winced in sympathy. The router would either reboot fine, or not. If not, they’d either managed to fuck up the flash or one of the processors on the line cards. Either way, off to hardware the card would go. Fixing it would cost precious time and money.
They both exhaled as the boot sequence flashed on the console and scrolled through normally. Michael logged in, ran a quick diagnostic. “Core dump.” He logged out. “I can do the rest from my desk.”
“Glad it came back,” Sam said. There weren’t many spare line cards around. Too expensive to keep a stockpile—not when customers needed them.
“Me too.” Michael shoved the keyboard back behind the monitor and then faced Sam. “I doubt you’re here to fix a server, though.”
