“How was your weekend?” asks Vixen one Monday morning.

They’re several weeks into this, whatever this could be said to be – an affair, infidelity, contravention of a good many workplace guidelines. Several weeks into, a few times a week, Vixen coming into Prophet’s office or Prophet going into his, or Vixen catching him in the stationery cupboard, the copy room. Two weeks ago, after a particularly late night, Vixen had escorted Prophet down to the car park to make sure he actually went home, and Prophet had ridden him in the backseat of his ridiculously clean four-by-four with the spotlessly clean wheel arches, had come to pieces with Vixen babbling some nonsense about how good Prophet looked in the harsh lighting.

It’s a little before ten, and Vixen has come in a little late, using his flexible hours to the fullest – he’s been doing his yoga routine on the office floor, and as Prophet sits back in the comfortable chair in front of Vixen’s desk, he watches as he strips off his little short shorts and his vest and the stupid fucking headband he wears to keep his manbun out of his face. Prophet is surprised he doesn’t wear fucking legwarmers into the deal – but then again, it’s still the summer, so maybe come the autumn Prophet’ll be treated to the sight of them and some tights into the deal, maybe a fucking leotard.

How the Hell Vixen has stayed in the closet for however many decades whilst being such an obvious faggot beggars belief.

There’s something funny to Prophet about the whole situation, sitting here sipping at his coffee and watching Vixen get himself naked, running a washcloth over his skin before he gets ready to towel himself off and put on his fucking suit. The blinds to the office are closed, and the door is locked – a few mornings and evenings a week, Prophet and Vixen are alone in the office together like this, and because Vixen is an insane person who has in his office not just a yoga mat but also an exercise ball, a set of weights, and a fucking stair machine, no one even bats an eyelid.

Hell, Nathan had turned to him earlier in the week in the staff kitchen and laughed, and asked if Mr Vixen kept jogging or lifting weights or whatever during their meetings, because he kept doing that with him.

Prophet is fairly certain that Vixen doesn’t get naked in front of the rest of the staff like he does in front of Prophet, but the fact that none of them raise so much as an eyebrow at them being locked up with the blinds shut together is convenient. It helps that there’s been such a staff turnover in the past few years, since Gideon left.

Most of the other staff don’t know Prophet is married, let alone that he’s married to a man – frankly, given that Prophet is old, scary, and grumpy, a lot of the younger staff barely think of him as an entity at all, except that he’s someone to complain about when he’s too scary or grumpy in anybody’s direction. He doubts most of them really think of him in any kind of sexual capacity at all, and he doubts it occurs to them that he might be fucking the boss. He’s not exactly nubile secretary material for all his administrative prowess.

He's got some stuff for the week to go over on the desk in front of him – the agenda for the morning meeting at eleven, a bunch of new data off their lorry sat navs, some upticks in their wholesale pricing because prices for fucking everything are going up.

“Prophet?” asks Vixen.

He’s polishing his soft cock with a washcloth like he’s a barman with a glass, standing there naked with his bare feet on the carpet of his office, and Prophet doesn’t laugh at the absurdity of the situation because he did all his laughing the first time this happened. Funnily enough, as mental as this still is, it’s sunk in by now. It’s almost – almost – normal.

“How was my weekend?” repeats Prophet belatedly.

How the fuck was his weekend? Awake early Saturday morning because he couldn’t fucking sleep, and Gideon had gone out after closing up the bar, so he’d woken up alone; he’d baked two loaves of bread and prepped meals for the rest of the week – stuff that Gideon could reheat for his lunch, lunches for Prophet at work, dinners for the night he wasn’t working in the pub. He’d cleaned the bathroom and kitchen, mowed the lawn, cleaned out the dishwasher. It’s making a weird noise of late, and some time this week he needs to ask Gideon to open the fucker up and fix it.

It's infuriating, sometimes, the fact that Gideon’s genuinely good at that sort of shit, the fact that Gideon is perfectly capable of taking apart every goddamn machine in the house and putting it back together so it works better, smoother. Hell, when Prophet’s stand mixer had finally given out a few years ago, Gideon had refused to let him buy a new one – he’d spent half a week digging through the electronics aisles in vintage stores until he’d found an older one and a bunch of pieces to trick it out himself.

Prophet had been there with it unwrapped, listening to Gideon apologise for the fact that it was made of ugly white plastic instead of the fancy chrome or painted metal that the new ones were, but this one had all these modes he’d put in himself in the garage, and it would be easier to repair, because “Prophet, sweetheart, this planned obsolescence shit, I know you want nice shiny kitchen appliances but I’ll be able to repair this, and it’ll run better, it’ll be more reliable, I swear.”

The thing is, it’s not true.

Prophet is fairly certain it’s not true, anyway – for stand mixers, they’re a niche enough product that that shit is unlikely to be a concern. About smartphones, about building their own PCs at home, that kind of shit – yeah, Gideon’s right there. He just gets blinders on, sometimes, doesn’t realise—

Prophet realises he’s smiling, and it fades when he goes from thinking about Saturday to thinking about Sunday: picking Gideon up from across town at six in the morning because he was drunk as a fish and some well-meaning fucking cop had taken the keys to his bike to keep him from fucking killing himself.

Prophet had driven him home, and after showing up to his NA meeting half an hour fucking late, he’d walked the hour out to the dive Gideon had been drinking in to drive the bike home while Gideon took the car to Crows.

“Weekend was fine,” says Prophet.

If he tries to jump right to business now, Vixen is going to give him one of his cool, steely looks and pout out his lips and mutter about how unsociable Prophet is, is going to have something of a tantrum, lecture Prophet about how he needs to learn how to make small talk if he’s going to do well with management.

The fact that Prophet has ascended the ranks of Friar Holdings precisely as much as he wants to is irrelevant to Vixen, let alone the fact that he is content in his role and its relative lack of contact with upper management for a reason.

If Vixen is feeling confident, perhaps he might even make some comment as to the dourness of the Scottish people, as he has done a few times over the past few weeks – if he’s feeling very brave, he might even comment that as a Jew, Prophet isn’t as talkative as Vixen would expect, although Prophet has found that Vixen is very shy of drifting into the realms of playful antisemitism, even if Prophet sets him up for it.

What Vixen has done, twice, is try to make general positive comments as to Israeli classmates at university, or to say he supports the state of Israel – each time, when Prophet has arched an eyebrow at him and asked what the fuck kind of relevance that has to him, Vixen has stumbled over his words and blustered and desperately changed the subject.

For all that, Vixen is learning to banter a bit, and the two of them have settled into something of a rhythm in their conversations about work, in their conversations about and during sex – Vixen is letting his inner bitch come out where Prophet’s concerned, and with that in mind, Prophet is willing to make some adjustments of his own.

Not through gritted teeth – see? He’s adjusting – Prophet asks, “How was yours?”

“Oh, very good, very good,” says Vixen pleasantly as he steps into his briefs, which are clean, tight, and much too white, much like the rest of the man. “I, er, I went out, Saturday night. In a— Would you believe me if I said I went to a leather bar?”

“No,” says Prophet blandly, but he can’t help but smile slightly as he says it, even though it’s difficult to keep that smile on his face as Vixen beams at him, far too fucking proud of himself.

“Well, I did,” says Vixen as he steps into his pale blue trousers and pulls them up. “I even wore some leather myself.”

“Found a jacket of your old da’s, did you?” asks Prophet.

Two twin pinpricks of colour appear high in Vixen’s cheeks. “My mother’s, actually,” he says, and Prophet laughs, tipping his fucking head back and putting his hand over his belly, and Vixen sighs very loudly, exaggeratedly. “You know what your problem is?”

“No, Vixen, why don’t you enlighten me?”

“Internalised homophobia.”

Prophet sniggers. “Your little girls teach you that one too, eh?”

He thinks about it, Vixen in the middle of a “leather bar” – what fucking leather bar he’s describing in and around Middlesbrough, he has no fucking idea – in an old leather jacket of his mother’s, probably too tight in the shoulders and tailored to accentuate hips he doesn’t have, maybe suede, maybe fray on the sleeves.

“You have a nice time?” asks Prophet as Vixen looks across at him, lips pinched as he buttons up his shirt.

“I did,” he says. “I was out rather late, in fact. My, uh, my, erm…” He blinks a few times, and the blush on his cheeks deepens, and he rubs the back of his neck, holding his tie loosely in the other hand.

“Paramour?” Prophet suggests in dry, sarcastic tones.

“Uh!” Vixen protests sharply, swinging with his tie as if to smack Prophet with the tail of it, and Prophet grins at him as savagely as he knows how. “Not paramour, no, that sounds so— so illicit. We’re each single, unattached men, there’s nothing wrong with it. But— lover. Man. Whatever you’d like to call it.”

“Whatever,” Prophet repeats.

“Well, he wanted me to stay out longer, sort of make a whole wild weekend of it, but I had to go home – I was taking the girls out Sunday afternoon for some sort of falconry thing, you know? Meet the owls and eagles and all the… They’re terribly big.” He says this last with some disapproval, wrinkling his nose. “Frightening, you know. Have you ever done that? Falconry?”

“No, Vixen, I’ve never done fucking falconry.”

“Would you like to?” asks Vixen. “The girls want to go again – I’ve been trying to get them interested in animals and that sort of thing. I could always bring you along – they’d be charmed to meet a friend of mine from work, I’m sure.”

“… You asking me on a fucking date?” asks Prophet, and he lets his lip curl as he does it, knows how it pulls his scars all shiny when he does it, knows it looks frightening, but the funny thing is, Vixen doesn’t back down.

He raises his blond eyebrows, shifts his lips into the slightest of smiles – with his hair down, not tied back like it is right now, he looks like some kind of fucking Disney prince, all around his shoulders the way it is. “I’m saying I couldn’t find an animal as wild as you at any zoo I could bring my daughters to.”

He says it fucking coolly, too, real cutting, and Prophet doesn’t laugh – doesn’t even smile – but it’s a close fucking thing, looking across the desk at the big old bitch who looks so fucking pleased with himself whenever he manages to so much as sling a rock at Prophet, let alone a verbal arrow.

“Well-played,” says Prophet finally, and Vixen chuckles as he tucks his shirt in and does up his belt. “You ready to go through these preliminaries before the meeting later?”

“About that,” says Vixen. “I’ve been doing some thinking, you know, all these, ah, supply chain issues, what with Brexit and all that. Over the past few years, more distributors have been moving their offices elsewhere, you know, out of the UK, and from what I’m hearing here and there, there’s no intention for Friars to go the same way.”

Prophet takes this in, taking a sip of his coffee as he looks up at Vixen as he slides his jacket on, smooths down the fabric, tightens his tie.

“And?” Prophet presses.

“There’s a shortage of lorry drivers,” says Vixen.

“HGV drivers, yeah,” says Prophet. “… And?”

“Well, the government’s meant to be doing all sorts,” says Vixen. “Hiring prisoners, even!”

Prophet doesn’t let himself inhale too deeply, doesn’t let himself show that it grates, how disgusted Vixen sounds when he says that, the revulsion on his face, the quiet horror at the idea of some convict driving a heavy goods vehicle back and forth. “They’re going to ex-offenders who’re trained to drive HGVs, yeah,” says Prophet after a moment.

“Well, the shortage is, you know, what with Covid, and too much reliance on foreign workers, you know, when we were in the EU, and with a lot of people ageing out, it’s all that, right?”

“No,” says Prophet. “There was never a fucking reliance on “foreign workers”,” he mutters, making air quotes and wondering for a moment if he’s going to have to break this truce he’s formed with Prophet upon hearing that he fucking voted for Brexit, “and the shortage of HGV drivers is not because of people ageing out, it’s because companies don’t fucking pay for people’s training anymore, and they don’t give people time off to do the fucking training or whatever the fuck. It’s fucking expensive, doing the training, getting rated, getting certified, and even after putting in the investment themselves, the drivers don’t then fucking get paid enough, so why would they bother?”

“Oh, good,” says Vixen, looking pleased, for some reason. “You’ve done the reading on this, then?”

“Reading?” Prophet repeats. The difference between he and Vixen, he supposes, is that he actually knows lorry drivers, and they drink in his pub.

“I want to train drivers,” says Vixen.

“I think you’re underqualified,” says Prophet.

“I want us to train drivers,” says Vixen, gesturing broadly to the rest of the building, waiting on the other side of the closed blinds. “I want us to form a training program, I want at least one of each of our warehouses to have a new apprentice on hand – I want the private medical certification, the hours of training, the price of the tests, all of it, to be paid for by us. On top of pay rises for our existing drivers – I know, I know, before you say it,” he says as Prophet opens his mouth, “a lot of the problem is the working hours, right? The fact that many of our current drivers are reaching retirement age, yes, yes, they’re thinking of leaving the industry, and I want to make it worth their while to stay. A pay rise, some additional benefits, more recognition from the company. That’s why I want to draw up, initially, a ten-year plan estimating what we can expect to change with the injection of some new blood.”

Prophet doesn’t say anything right away, but he slowly takes his phone out of his pocket, opening up the notes app and jotting some of that down. A part of him feels—

He thinks about it, thinks about sitting in someone’s office just like this, thinks about when this position was Gideon’s, when Prophet was working with him, when Gideon would throw some goddamn insanely expensive idea like this across the desk at him, expect Prophet to make it happen, and he would.

All of Gideon’s old management awards are in a box in the back of the wardrobe, wrapped in paper so the glass doesn’t chip.

“You realise this is gonna be fucking expensive,” says Prophet, but he’s already thinking about what surveys he’s gonna need to do, what projections, what reports he’ll need to pull. The top brass’ll need a lot of convincing, some fucking finagling, but as much as Vixen gets on Prophet’s fucking tit, he’s pretty sure he’ll be able to sell it, and fucking anyway, they’ll probably be able to get some significant bursaries if they want to put significant cash down for the investment.

“One has to speculate to accumulate, Prophet,” says Vixen.

“You’re such a fucking homo.”

“Pot. Kettle.”

“Oh, I ain’t all black, mate. I’m grey, me.”

“Grey? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Play for both sides, don’t I?”

“Both si— You mean…?” Vixen suddenly turns on him, his eyes wide as dinnerplates, his mouth agape. He suddenly hushes his voice as though he’s saying something unspeakable as he says, “You mean you, erm, you sleep with… with women?”

“Not since I got married,” says Prophet, trying not to laugh at Vixen’s face, at the way that he’s acting like bisexuality is the most devastating thing he’s heard of in all existence. It’s not true, in any case – he stopped fucking other people some time before he and Gideon got married. “You got some kind of problem with that?”

“Well,” says Vixen. “I mean— If you’re not, you know, actually having… If you’re not with women, you’re not—”

“I’m pretty sure I’m still fucking bisexual, Vixen,” says Prophet. “They don’t take your license away because you tie the knot – any more than marrying your wife suddenly made you straight.”

“License?”

“… Little thing we call a joke where I come from,” says Prophet. “They not come up with it down south yet?”

“I just, I don’t know,” says Vixen, adjusting himself and moving his shoulders like he’s some sort of bird. “I suppose I just thought— Well. Obviously I know that it, you know, it, erm, exists, it just seems so…”

“You thought bisexuality wasn’t real?”

“I knew it was real,” demurs Vixen. “Merely— Well. I just, I thought it was… It’s really not… I don’t know. You actually find them attractive?”

“Women? They’re not a fucking alien species, Vixen.”

“They might as well be,” Vixen mutters, and Prophet considers pointing out to the man that he has three young daughters who he purports to love and care about, but the minutes are ticking away before their Monday morning meeting, and he’s really not interested in fighting out the merits of feminism with this fucking asshole when he’s slept a grand total of fourteen hours over the past three days.

“Are you ready to go over these fucking reports, Vixen?”

“You could call me Vance,” he suggests.

“… Will that make you go over these reports?”

“Have you got time in your schedule?” presses Vixen first. “Say, four-ish? You could pop in here.”

“You gonna make it worth my while?”

“Well,” says Vixen mildly. “I thought I’d bend you over and fuck you over the desk. I’ve noticed your nipples are quite sensitive – I thought I’d tug and pull at them a bit. I’ve not really played with them much before.”

There’s a burning heat under Prophet’s clothes, a prickling of his chest, on the back of his neck, and it must show in his face, because Vixen has that steely look in his brown eyes, the colour of them dark and perfect and—

Fuck.

“You want to start on my nipples, Vixen, I’m gonna need longer than the forty-five minute gap in your schedule.”

“Say six?” presses Vixen, smiling disarmingly.

“Six,” says Prophet obediently, and it makes him shiver, the approval on Vixen’s face, and God, fuck, he’s forgotten how good it feels, how much it thrills him, to be wanted the way that Vixen fucking wants him right now, to be told, Hell, not even told, to be asked.

How many times have the two of them fucked over the past few weeks? Three or four times every week, often with Prophet bent over, hard over a desk or a copier or a shelf, or a few times with Prophet riding him in his fancy ergonomic chair, plus the time in the car.

Gideon’s been in a weirdly contented mood, apart from the occasional big benders – he’s been more sober than usual, more cheerful, more active around the house, had actually fixed the broken door on the medicine cabinet which Prophet’s been asking him to fix for months, and business at the Crows has been decent, with Gideon doing more of his hours, not being as much of a dick about asking Prophet to cover.

“Good man,” says Vixen, reaching over and patting Prophet’s hand. “Let’s get to business, shall we?”

“Sure,” murmurs Prophet, and puts thoughts of Gideon aside for the time being.