Chapter 2

Clean and warm, Lily led Frank and John back to the large bed for the promised snuggle. As they got in, Frank touched a small tablet next to the bed and the overhead lights dimmed to a shadowy glow.

"That's better," he said and refilled their wine glasses using the last of the bottle of pinot grigio for Lily. "Never a dull moment with you around, Lil."

She reclined against the pillowed headboard and responded with a satisfied hum. John climbed in next to her while Frank sat across from them in the middle of the bed.

"Cheers," Frank said, but something in his eyes made John frown.

"But you're not very cheery right now, are you?" John asked as he sipped the lukewarm wine. "Anything you wanna share?"

Frank's first reaction looked to be to deny it, but the words never made it past his lips when Lily reached over to touch his hand to encourage him.

"I have a confession as well," he said as he looked up at Lily's worried expression.

"I knew something was off," she said. "Your smile never reached your eyes today."

He spun the stem of the wine glass between his fingers and thumb. "I'm about to lose everything." The statement hung there for a moment as he pursed his lips and blinked back tears. "It's a long, complicated story, but the bottom line is I missed something and it's come back to bite me. I've got to layoff twelve good people this week who depend on me to make a living. My whole office. The timing sucks, but a selfish part of me wanted you to be here when I do it."

"I'm so sorry," Lily whispered for them both. "Can we do anything to help?"

"You're here," he said as he blinked back tears. "That's so much more than I ever expected before I met you."

Without a word, Lily and John touched him together, running their hands all over, easing the tension in his muscles as they could. Frank sighed and shut his eyes, letting them lead.

"Thank you," Frank muttered.

Lily bent to lick along his shaft while John continued to caress his balls. Bending to join her, they kissed each other around his shaft, licking along the sides and taking turns sucking the head in their mouths.

"So nice." He touched their hair and rubbed their shoulders as they continued to bring him along. When the first beads of precum appeared, Lily took him in deeply a few times before giving John a chance.

Keeping Frank moving along, they continued to alternate, their saliva dripping down to pool in his pubic hair. Frank began to hold his breath, then to pant only to hold it again.

Lily had him in her mouth when he stiffened and moaned softly. John lay back down next to him and touched his chest, kissing him while he pulsed his lust into Lily's wet mouth.

When he was still, Lily drew the sheets up as she came to nestle against his side opposite John. Frank had a look of peace at last, his forehead smooth and a faint smile on his lips. He drifted off to sleep while Lily and John watched him, their faces lined with worry.

Breakfast was a more subdued affair than dinner, but Frank kept things light. John recognized the undercurrent of depression now for what it was. It made him rethink events on the ski trip late into the night, especially after Frank slipped out of bed to sit at his desk across the room in the wee hours of the morning.

John was certain that finding himself attracted to a man after thirty years had added to Frank's stress. John knew that feeling first hand. As he recalled the ski trip, the frantic typing on his laptop that second morning took on a new perspective, as did his sudden hostility and mood swings. In the middle of his life the falling apart, Frank discovered two people as vulnerable to him as he was to them.

No wonder he was so desperate for the connection they'd discovered together. John swallowed the lump in his throat when he considered how lonely Frank must have felt before the trip. Watching him cook bacon for them all, looking waifish with his bare chest and tousled hair, made his heart go out even more for his friend.

The lift came down carrying Lily wearing John's dark green shirt. She had rolled up the sleeves, but the shirt tail was barely long enough to cover her ass and mons, leaving her lovely legs exposed to her hips.

"I love your shower," she purred as she padded into the kitchen on bare feet. When she stood on tiptoes to kiss Frank good morning, John hummed at the sight of her muscular calves. She turned towards him and said, "Thanks for letting me steal your shirt."

"Keep it. You look better in it than I do," he chuckled as she came for her good morning kiss. She tasted of mint and heat as she teased her tongue along his lips. She stepped back between the two men with a frown of concentration.

"I've been thinking," Lily started, staring at her fingertips.

"Oh boy," Frank moaned. "Hang on, John, trouble's comin'. I can feel it."

Lily chuckled and sighed. "Not about sex. My bucket list is getting shorter thanks to you guys, but for any more I'll need to find us ... never mind." John chuckled when she actually blushed. "I was thinking about your work situation."

"No," Frank answered with a rough tone, shaking his head. "I wasn't asking for anything from you. I just needed to let you know. Somehow I've got to tell my employees, friends, and family I've failed them. It's gonna be hard enoughâ€""

"Look, I'm in marketing, John's in project management. Why don't you let us take a deeper look at what's going on. We might be able to see something you don't see."

Frank was silent as he picked the crisp bacon out of the frying pan with a fork. He took a deep breath and turned to them.

"I thought being smart and working hard was enough. I've learned the hard way that who you know and who owes you are more important."

Lily nodded. "That's all marketing is. My industry contacts are my resume."

"Well, I came from the tech side. I had a boss who blocked an idea I had about data mining this huge database of drug test results and interactions for a pharmaceutical company we worked for. I got frustrated, so I quit and spent a few months inventing a generalized approach to solving that problem and pitched it at the boss a couple of levels up to evaluate its merit."

Lily covered her mouth. "You can't just undermine someone like that, even if he is a jerk. Corporate politics are fucked up, but that's like declaring war."

"It worked that time," Frank said with a shrug. "They bought my first startup to keep me from selling the same tool to their competitors. I worked a couple of years under a strict employment contract, but that same boss I'd had trouble with undermined me and blocked every new idea I came up with."

John was nodding at the familiar story told in their industry. "Let me guess; you tried the same thing again?"

"Yeah, they had me on a tight non-compete, so for my second company I dug into natural language processing. I put together a small team to make a tool to build and query a corpus of their unstructured drug related data. They had all these lab notes, reports, and plans in hundreds of different places across the company. We tuned and weighted the index for drug industry terms to make it more useful, so once I got them to bite for a demonstration, I was able to hook the back-end into the same API as the data mining tool. It worked better than I'd dreamed."

"That's brilliant." John rubbed his forehead. "And meanwhile your old boss was still gunning for you?"

"He was nicer the second time they bought my company. I didn't figure out what was up until this year." He cracked three eggs over the frying pan and picked up the spatula.

"Was it a set up?" Lily asked, riveted by the story. Frank nodded.

"I'd hired even more programmers to make a simple tablet interface so the execs could browse and query the data themselves. I knew the API backwards and forwards at this point, but I'm not a user interface guy. It was harder being a pure manager than I thought it would be. I got in the weeds, then a couple of my key guys quit." He flipped the eggs over and whispered, "I think it was my fault because I didn't listen to them enough."

"Project management is much harder than it looks. People think I sit around playing with Gannt charts and calendars all day. It's a hell of lot more organic than that. Being a good project manager isn't a skill you can learn from a book or a class."

"Tell me about it," Frank said as plated their eggs. He placed them on the kitchen table that was already set for them to eat breakfast together.

"Maybe I can help," John offered, feeling the need to do something to ease Frank's pain.

He shook his head and sighed. "There's more. The old boss put together a skunk-works team inside the company to build a similar interface and I didn't know it until the pitch meeting two weeks ago. He was friendly because he was picking my brain for ideas. They've already invested too much internally to be interested in another acquisition. My old boss made sure to shake my hand on the way out of that meeting."

"So no product and no buyer," Lily said as the last pieces fell into place. "And the product is too niche to sell to someone else even if you had it working perfectly."

"And at this point I've got every penny tied up in the new company. We went way over budget while I tried to learn how to manage." His eyes were full when he looked over. "I've been in a really dark place for a while now. The ski trip was my last hurrah." He wiped his eyes.

"There's got to be something we can do," John said and Lily nodded with him.

"It's too late. I'll just have to get a job somewhere and start over."

"I wish we could do something to help." Lily said as she rubbed his back.

"You are," Frank said, giving her a weak smile. "I've only told a handful of people at this point. You'll meet my best friend, Roger, later. He plays drums in the band and is also my corporate attorney. And as close as we are, he doesn't call me right back anymore like he used to. Once I do the layoffs and everyone finds out..." He pinched his lips and frowned until he got control of himself. "If you guys don't want to stick around this week, I'll understand."