Leroy Adkins is an underperformer. He barely graduated. He barely got a job, and he hardly socializes in his day-to-day life.
Zachary Turner has been sick for as long as he can remember, and as he grows older the crushing realization that he never...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
As much as Leroy had encouraged Zachary to think about himself, and not about upsetting his sister when it came to if he wanted to go to the fair—it didn't mean he wasn't disappointed when Zachary looked him in the eyes when they'd driven to his parking lot and said, "you know. I don't think I have it in me to go anywhere tomorrow."
Leroy had smiled, looking down at his lap, not wanting to show his disappointment. "Oh, okay," he'd said, looking over at Zachary's lawn. "I guess we walked around a lot today."
They had—after the movie they'd looked at stores, and window shopped. At a point, they'd grabbed snacks and even spent some time in the arcade. They'd only started heading home when Leroy pointed out it was getting late.
Dropping Zach off had hands down been the worst part of the day, and when Leroy slept that night, he tousled and turned, occasionally searching for the man with his hands. He wanted him at arm's length and, having had a taste of that, his bed now felt too big—too empty.
When Monday came around, he went into auto-pilot mode, getting ready for work, and heading out as soon as it was time. He had his presentation around ten minutes after eleven in the morning, and he just wanted to get it over with. When it was time, he tried not to look too hard at the people present—his manager, someone else from the marketing team, and two representatives from their client's business.
Leroy had expected to pretty much go through the PowerPoint and call it a day, but the client representatives were engaged and asked a lot of questions about the sampling change.
When the allotted presentation time ran out, Leroy wrapped things up and asked anyone to email him if they had any more questions. He was stacking up his printouts when his manager approached him, standing right beside him as she stared at the open journal where he'd scribbled his notes.
"Can I have a word with you before you go?" his manager said, leaning forward. Leroy turned to look at her before looking about the room. He noticed his co-worker and the client representatives had started making their way out of the conference room, and it was just him and his boss now.
Leroy looked back at her, raising a brow but nodding anyway. "Sure."
"I have a question," the lady said, sitting at the edge of the conference desk as she dangled her own just under her chin. "How did you figure that out? Not that I'm complaining. If anything, I'm impressed. You've saved us a business deal where all we were planning to do before was pretty much summarize why we couldn't help them."
Leroy stared at his manager for a bit, looking down at the floor as he rubbed the back of his neck. This was unusual. He wasn't used to getting praise. If anything, he was constantly stressed out that his role in the company would be scrapped altogether and he would be let go.
"Er, can I be honest with you?" he said, looking up after a while of thinking.
The lady raised her brow, looking concerned. "You're not going to tell me you outsource your work, are you? Client confidentiality—"
