Work and Play Pt. 12

A/N: Hey all! This is a special chapter. You will quickly learn why! It is also pretty darn long, and has some flashback that shouldn't be confusing, but it might be. Enjoy :)

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Gabriel sits across from Yessica in the airport café. She stirs her coffee slowly, creepily. She's added so much sugar and cream and milk that he doesn't know if it qualifies as coffee anymore. She hums along to a Spanish song, playing on her earphones.

"Thanks for picking me up," Gabriel says, loudly enough that he hopes she gets the message. She sets her things down, phone and water. "From the airport."

"You're welcome."

"You didn't have to do that."

"You would complain if I didn't," Yessica sighs. "You can't even pretend to be happy to see me, don't pretend to be thankful," she quips, arms folded, leaned back. Automatic defensive.

Gabriel sighs. "So, do you want to go home? Or..."

"I'm hungry," Yessica sighs. "A sandwich can't hurt."

"Sandwich it is," Gabriel agrees.

"Better get the most perfect sandwich. Before you hop on a plane without telling me again," Yessica leaves her things at the table, snatches her wallet and heading to the Which Wich. A gesture of disrespect; she knows Gabriel should be paying. She is particularly good at the unquestionable hostility. Not bad enough to really comment on. Bad enough to actively avoid her wrath.

Yes, he decided if he had to have another "why can't you just try harder" conversation—the "you" being either of them—he would probably lose it. So when he felt one coming on in the beginning of March, he and Jiao arranged for him to temporarily transfer to Colorado. She told him he should at least tell Yessica. He huffed like a bull and Jiao left it alone.

The next thing he knew, he was in a cabin with Jiao for a four-day, unplugged vacation. They camped in the hot springs. They rolled their pants up to their ankles and caught fish in icy waters. They took walks, and smoked weed. He and Jiao reminisced on high school memories, and they painted Bob Ross. Gabriel felt alive. A day after that, he walked into OrtegaTech Colorado, and told Yessica where he was.

Now, Yessica slaps a sandwich down on the table. One he'll probably enjoy; Yessica has him memorized. His first bite of turkey, swiss, lettuce, pickle, tomato, spicy ranch, other extras she's seen him order a million times, and he feels a little better. The resentment he feels for California because of this woman. The way a sandwich seems to make it better.

"Thank you," he says. Yessica nods. He doesn't know what he could even talk about. Yessica is the type to be mad every day for a month, which is probably what she did while he was away. Regardless, he's afraid any deep conversation would have him spilling his guts about Zeke.

His adrenaline kept him up on the plane. He wishes he'd caught Clay Edgar at any other time, in any other place than the company barbeque and basketball game. He closed his eyes, thought of his fists pounding into the smug face of that pedazo de mierda. He thinks of Zeke, upset and tearful. It makes him grind his teeth, the low marbley sound vibrating in his ears. He huffs, stopping the tapping of his foot. Something Zeke did often. Does... often.

Gabriel decides to break the silence as they clean up. "I have a lot of work to do."

"Yes, of course. Disappearing to Colorado in the middle of the night sounds like a lot of work. Staying away from me for a MONTH, sounds like a lot—" she sets her sandwich down, "—of work. When do you want to go into this?"

"I had to go for a lot of different reasons. You take everything personally."

"We were in the middle of something, and you left me, Gabriel. We were figuring things out, and you left me anyway. Like a coward. Because you can't follow through on shit."

Gabriel didn't even know what he was doing sitting across from Yessica. Her bright pink cap, plain white shirt. After meeting Zeke, he almost despises how put-together she seems compared to Zeke's put-togetherness. Yessica's controlling ways are always a part of something bigger. Malicious. Zeke controls because he has to for his own functionality. Zeke is still learning that he can be a leader, a force to be reckoned with. Zeke is the person that keeps getting better once he realizes the depth of his impact. He's a weirdo, yes, but he's a unique person. Gabriel longs to dig into the stories of the young man's life. The tiny glimpse into Zeke's sheltered past explains a lot of his little quirks.

Nothing Gabriel knows about Yessica explains her need to be so evil.

Gabriel had considered himself a funny person before he met her. She insisted he needed to up his game, insert himself deeper into his father's company. He did. She made him a powerful speaker. A powerful planner. She was only 21 at the time. So intense. He could have never guessed she was seven years his junior. She was spoiled beyond spoiled, and he didn't realize it until he was spoiling her, too. Yessica hid it well. When she was good, she was great. That was only rarely nowadays. Especially since the New Year. So he sits at the table, feeling defeated.

Gabriel clears his throat "I thought things were good enough that I could... go do what I needed."

"That's a fucking lie."

----

ONE WEEK LATER

Gabriel sits on the edge of the couch, prepared to head to the beach if Yessica gets too unbearable, which seems to be her goal for the day. They've been on and off, a simple conversation here, a laugh when appropriate. An argument almost every night. Toxicity.

It bleeds into his texts, his calls with Zeke. He wishes he could flip the switch and be sweet to him. The young man who means so much, all out of nowhere. That firey, old-brick red hair, the naturally-cocky-as-a-defense-mechanism gait about him. He tries to think of these things as Yessica picks at him, as he wonders what to do. How much will he be telling her?

He did come to California with a loose agenda: end things with Yessica, fix what he could of the company. move back to Colorado indefinitely. Win over Zeke. There's only so much he can do at a time. Ending things with Yessica might not even be the right thing for him at this time. He's done a few spontaneous things in his life that usually end up working themselves out. Gabriel can't even make himself see Colorado as a spontaneous thing that ends up working out his relationship with Yessica. This is not one of those moments. But the unsure nature of it all, the way this feels like it's something leading up to something else... Gabriel can't shake it.

She sits across from him in the dim light, flipping through her word find. He sees the ring glisten as it catches the light. A villainous kind of glint. He feels himself take over the chair as he looks her way. She can't ignore it. "Yes?"

"I had to fire someone over Zoom today," Gabriel sighs. He doesn't even know what he's going to talk about, or how they're going to get real. She seems to understand work, so he starts there.

"You hate firing people," she says, talking down to her puzzle. "What did they do, rape someone on the fuckin' job?" She's so monotonous, it instantly makes Gabriel furious on a quicker scale than he's seen in a while.

"Fuckin' basically, Yessica? Is that what you wanted to hear?" he booms. There's the jump. She flinches at his tone, and her face turns to anger. "You know what? I thought you not having a shred of emotion was intriguing at first but now—"

"But now, what? But now, I'm too intense for you? Newsflash, I've always been too intense for you."

Gabriel thinks of the look on Clay Edgar's face as he called for his termination. The only thing he could do, since he couldn't rip him apart physically. He wanted to make Yessica make that face.

"You can't 'anger,' or 'bitch' your way out of you cheating on me. You fucking whore." Gabriel seethes. There it is. The unbelievability of his words as they arrowed into her ears. They said they would never mention it again. How did she trick him into that one? She somehow illusioned him into thinking that if they never talked about it again, if they blamed their problems on everything else, if he swallowed the words every time he didn't trust her—it would go away. They would be back to "normal." What bullshit.

Yessica doesn't even put her book down. "How many fucking times! Do I have to APOLOGIZE!!"

"Enough times to be FUCKING SORRY!" With that, Gabriel trudges over, snatching the book from her small hands.

This is not the fighting that leads to sex. He usually hates real fighting. But this feels good. This is the breakup fight. The fact that the thought after "breakup" is "Zeke Hartigan here I come" tells Gabriel everything he needs to know.

Yessica sits back down as he hurls the book across the room. It causes more damage than it should, knocking over a vase, a frame, hitting some glass, some metal fixtures. "Yessica—YOU started this. You tried to fucking cry it away, and sweet-talk me, and sex it away and then you tried to BABY it away. All I wanted you to do is be goddamn sorry for cheating on me. But now you want a fuckin' baby."

"I didn't want a KID just so you would forgive me for my one goddamn mistake! How dare you call me a whore?!" The waterworks, the tantrums. She's emotionless until it's time to cry.

"One mistake?" Gabriel stands over her, veins popped out of forearms and teeth clenched. "Are you sorry? Were you ever sorry?"

"I WAS! I was so incredibly, overwhelmingly sorry, Gabriel. So damn sorry."

"Are you sorry now?" he asks. She pauses for too long. "No. You're not. You did it to punish me, and it worked."

Yessica scoffs, tears flowing. "I wasn't punishing you, Gabriel. For the last. Time. I just felt like you cared more about this stupid company than you did me."

"So you gotta go fuck someone to get my attention?" Gabriel urges.

"What else was going to work?!" she yells. Then silence.

Gabriel nods. He feels the calm in the storm. The recognition that he had a part in this. Always putting others over himself. Yessica was always cold. He thought it was intriguing. Now it was just... pathetic. He can't help but think of the times in the last month where he felt everything but pathetic. He felt interesting. There were instances he felt godly.

With Zeke.

"I guess you're right," he says, almost a whisper.

"I'm right... so, what? You finally fucked Ching-Chong? You fucked some puta in Colorado?"

"Just shut the fuck up," Gabriel dismisses her with a laugh, gathering his things, and dialing Jiao.

"You probably took the first opportunity you could. You've been WAITING to get back at me. I know you did. You want to talk about this shit, let's talk! Let's talk about how a month from now, you're going to be walking around sad, wishing I could read your mind."

Gabriel speeds up his exit. "I am one thousand percent positive that will not happen. We will certainly not be seeing each other in a month."

"What the hell does that mean?"

'It means we're done."

________

ONE WEEK LATER

Jiao picks at the banana on her frozen yogurt, and swipes a hair from her face.

Gabriel's best friend has always been a beautiful sight. He felt like everyone looked at her as they walked past. He felt like he had to watch everyone who tried to look her way, fight them off like wolves. It came from knowing that she's always been the type of person to give everyone a chance, even when she shouldn't. He realized this when they were teenagers. They'd grown up together. As close to a sister as a non-sister can get.

"I think Zeke is pretty done with me." He eyes a man who has been turned away from his table and toward Jiao for a while. All Gabriel and Jiao have done for the last week is shit on Yessica as they moved his stuff into a storage. She keeps asking whether or not he will fully transition to Colorado. She offers to move with him. He doesn't make a choice. Jiao says she understands.

One thing they haven't brought up is Zeke, given the last few conversations surrounding Roderick Tracy's sneaky attack into his personal life. He thinks Jiao knows that it's scary to think about how Zeke could be used against him. Gabriel has already went all the directions with that one. With the consideration of CEO, and the lawsuit, and trying to gather evidence and be calculated--

"Done with you," Jiao interrupts his thoughts, and she eats a big scoop. "I think he's like a little puppy."

"He's definitely not obedient," Gabriel muses. And suddenly all that other worry fades. He thinks of the many times he's had with Zeke, arguing. How many times he's pushed past the guilt of taunting Zeke; that guilt turning into curiosity, entertainment, arousal.

Zeke is definitely not a puppy, not obedient. In fact, his snippiness was something Gabriel hated at first. The break room incident often played in his head. The first time he interacted with Zeke. He'd been hanging furniture, making a spontaneous effort to decorate an office that he didn't know he'd be in for more than a few days, max. A slip of a hammer, subsequently some glass, and Gabriel's thumb was leaking blood.

He frantically searched for something to clean himself up with, as Jiao freaked out in her own office but came up short. He made his way to a break room, barging in. How was he supposed to know someone would be standing in his shoulder space?

He was beyond pissed at the slender, ginger man that snapped at him in his own building. So pissed that he found out exactly who he was afterward, what he did at the company—found out he was the youngest person in the building. The snappy redhead was smart. He wondered why he stared at the employee photo for so long, just the kid with a relaxed wave in his red hair, a small smirk with dark pink lips. Freckles so intricately placed, a smattering along the bridge of his slender nose, they were prominent even in a slightly blurry photo. Gabriel frowned at the way "Ezekiel Hartigan" kept his head slightly tipped back in his photo, with almost a knowing look in his darkish-blue eyes as they beamed into the camera. Like a frat boy. Like a boy next door. He stared and stared, and felt an unfamiliar twinge in his stomach. At the time, he took it as a sign of bad vibes, a sign that he wasn't going to like the kid. He didn't know why he felt the need to question who hired him and why. He didn't know why he was so pissed that Ezekiel Hartigan, Ads and Sales Manager, had reacted the way anyone would react to being knocked over in a break room by someone they didn't know.

He didn't know why he felt the need to almost frantically exit from all of his research regarding Ezekiel Hartigan when Jiao walked into the room. Not at the time.

Gabriel stuffed the thought of the man into the back of his head.

Now, with everything that had happened since then, he knows exactly what that twinge was. Jiao has been a vital part of his figuring it out. She's never liked Yessica.

"He is very cute. And he always gets you embarrassed and sensitive. That is also very cute. And I think that when you met him... you got really motivated really fast. Like he's a little companion." Jiao teases him. "You like him VERY much."

This was true. As soon as Gabriel disclosed the events of St. Patrick's Day, Jiao was instantly calling for an end to Yessica's presence in his life. The conversation went swiftly:

"The St. Patrick's Day party was actually pretty good!" Jiao mused once they got home, happily drunk. "Great people at this branch."

"Yeah..." They both brushed at the double sink, rather lazily. Gabriel spat out Listerine. "I had sex in a break room." He knew she would react with the combined shock, excitement, beratement, and curiosity that usually comes with Jiao, but he wanted to really drop the news on her that it was—

"What?! Gabriel you are getting messy as FUCK! I love it! Wh-what?" she shoved his shoulders. "You can't just fuck your employees. But oh my god! Yes!! About time! Fuck Yessi! Who is she?"

Gabriel felt his face get hot, and he stared at himself in the mirror as she brushed. "Um... I... a redhead."

Jiao's face scrunched in confusion, and then shifted into nosy curiosity. "A white girl? What's her name? What does she do?"

"...His name is Ezekiel."

Jiao's jaw dropped, and the toothbrush dropped out with it. "A MAN?!?!"

From then, Jiao raved not only about Gabriel finally "breaking loose" from Yessi, but him "exploring his sexuality," even though he didn't seem to have an answer. There were some obvious clues to bisexuality. At the time, he just didn't know what to think.

"It's like you found your own little lucky leprechaun! And then fucked him!" she said.

---

Presently, Gabriel thinks of all the things he needs to do in order to even get back to Colorado. To that new place, with that new feeling of hope. Maybe it's not right to hop into one thing right after another.

"I do like him."

"Who knew you'd meet a man you liked? Have you thought about what you... identify with?" Over a month later, and the same question brings him anxiety. Gabriel has avoided this conversation for some time. And Jiao knows it. He can tell her that yes, he knows now that he's bisexual. And yes, it took Zeke, in all of his twinky glory, to make him realize that.

He can't tell her, however, that Zeke is not the first man he's been with.

Before Yessica, before the bigger moves. Before the multi-millionaire status, and before the thought of being anything but straight crossed his mind, Gabriel was 27, and his best friend, Jiao, was 27, and her boyfriend at the time, Jalen, was 28.

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SIX YEARS PRIOR

Gabriel wasn't fond of being a third wheel, and Jiao and Jalen were the kind of inseparable that made him feel the same insecurities as he did when he was a too-big middle schooler. Towering over teachers. Unable to socialize. He was happy for his friends. They were cute. Gabriel's luck with relationships had been slim. One night stands got boring early, way before age 27. Gabriel never felt like he could keep up with the coke-ridden, sweaty, women-littered fantasies of his friends. He liked to have friends with benefits. He liked forming relationships, even if not romantic. He was never a one-off guy. Jiao said these things about him, so he knew they were true. He'd had a few nice, not-too-deep sexual adventures with some wonderful women.

Women who always ended up breaking things off with him, to start their "real lives."

But lately, he'd been feeling the hollowness that came with the transition between his lives. As a man with potential, and a man with realistic goals. A man without a woman. A man feeling like he could do everything and nothing at the same time. A man ready to make moves, without any moves to make.

So he agreed to accompany Jiao and Jalen on their "business trip" to Vegas, of all places. He was hesitant, but then realized that he could use a good bender, some good trouble, to make him realize some things. And of course, he would do anything to help Jiao build her resume. Pretty soon, he was on a plane, sandwiching Jiao with Jalen on the other side. They talked the whole time, oftentimes the conversation involving Jalen and Gabriel poking fun at their mutual.

Gabriel insisted on another suite entirely, but Jiao was almost angry at the suggestion. "They have two different rooms, Gabe. You can do whatever you want with whoever you want, and you and Whoever and me and Jalen will get breakfast Saturday morning. After a few spins at the bar, and the casino."

"Jiao, I am trying to do business on Thursday and Friday, get a little drunk, and go to bed. By myself."

Jiao made big eyes at him, and then started to bow, exaggeratedly, in Chinese fashion, pleading with him. Gabriel was reminded of her mother, a very traditional Chinese woman who took no mess, but would often berate Jiao with exaggerated bowing and pleads in their middle school days. He cracked up, and told her to stop, and called her Mrs. Su-uyi Liang. That made her hit him gently.