Rain Storms Ch. 02

"I'm not a diva," Sheldon argued. "I just know what I want."

"You know what everyone wants," Steve corrected.

They were snipping at each other but they were both grinning. There was blatantly a lot of love there, and it was comforting to know that it's possible to find someone like that. I wanted that kind of love in my life. I was tossing around the possibility of Dylan being that man for me when something Sheldon said broke through my reverie.

"Now, if you can just get my favorite artist to sign onto the deal, I'll be in hog heaven."

I groaned inwardly. Did he mean who I thought he did?

"Who's the artist?" Dylan asked. "I'll get to work on it on Monday."

Sheldon looked right at me when he answered, "Eric Unger."

Everyone turned to me. I had four sets of eyes drilling holes in me when I put my head down on the table.

I was on the floor, under the receptionist's desk, when I heard her take a sharp breath. Holly had been leaning back against the wall behind her desk while I checked her cabling, but when I looked up at her gasp, she was standing straight up with a seductive smirk on her face.

"I have a two o'clock." I heard the unmistakable sultry rumble of the voice that never failed to make my spine tingle and other parts of my body sit up and take notice. I cursed under my breath.

"And your name?" Holly purred and leaned over the desk, I'm sure, exposing her ample cleavage to him. I wondered if he looked, felt a twinge of jealousy, and brutally stamped those feelings into the ground.

"Eric Unger."

"Oh yes, Mr. Unger," she purred some more and I had the urge to do something mean to her legs. "They will be just a moment but I can show you to the conference room. Right this way. Would you like... something... while you wait?"

Ok. She was going to take him to the conference room. I could just hide under the desk until he was securely behind the door. Of course, the fact that she was blatantly offering him sex made me want to jump up and strangle her. Especially when I heard the deep rumble of his chuckle. "If I think of anything I need, you'll be the first I call on."

"Hey, Rain," Jason called. "Whatever you did it's working. It's pinging now."

"Rain?" Eric echoed.

Well, fuck. "Not anymore," I said as I crawled out from under the desk with a nicked network cable. "The cable is damaged, Jase," I explained. "Can you grab some CAT? Three feet should do."

"What happened to it?" he asked.

I bent the cable at the slice. "Looks like it got cut."

Jason took the cord and glared at it. "This is the third one."

Jason and I both turned to Holly. She colored slightly. "I might have stepped on it." Stepping on it wouldn't have caused the damage. She had to have been cutting them intentionally. She was cute, if you went for the Cowboys Cheerleader look, but not very bright.

"Rain?" Eric repeated.

Jason and I both looked up at Eric.

"Is that...?" Jason whispered loudly enough for everyone to hear.

"Yes," I replied in a normal speaking voice.

"He's really tall," he whispered just as loudly.

I rolled my eyes. "Smooth, Jase," I grumbled. "Why don't you go replace the cable?"

"Oh yeah," he said. "Sure."

"What are you doing here, Rain?" Eric asked.

"Working," I replied curtly and walked past him toward the server room.

"You work here?" he asked, following me.

I turned to face him.

"Ah. Mr. Unger," Dylan interrupted upon walking out of his office further down the hall. "I see you've met our network guru."

Eric ignored Dylan. "Rain?"

"Thank you, Rain," Dylan continued. "I'll show Mr. Unger to the conference room. Right this way, please."

Eric didn't budge. He didn't even look at Dylan. He just kept looking at me with his stormy gray eyes filled with sorrow.

"Go have your meeting, Eric," I said gently. "I have work to do."

It wasn't even ten minutes later when I looked up to a rap on the server room door. I rolled the chair over and opened it to admit Eric.

"I took a blood test," he told me. "Will you talk to me again when the results come back and I have proof?"

I glanced at Jason behind me. He was openly staring at Eric. I glared at him until he noticed and went back to work. "That's not the problem, Eric."

"Then what is?" he asked.

I sighed. "This is neither the time nor the place. I'm working here."

"You name the time and place, Rain," Eric offered. "I'll be there."

"You want to talk now?" I snapped. "That's rich."

"Rain, please. I'm trying."

He sounded so melancholy that I didn't have the heart to bitch at him anymore. "Call me when you get the results. Maybe we can talk then."

He smiled but it didn't reach the sadness in his eyes. "Thank you."

I nodded and turned back to the console. He stood at the door silently for a few minutes, watching me work, before he left. I waited until I was sure that he'd be gone before I left the room and went straight for Dylan's office.

"You asshole," I snarled. "You could have warned me."

"We can't do this here," he replied. "I will be happy to talk to you but after work, ok?"

"Fine. Fuck it." I stormed out of his office and back to the server room.

"That was your ex?" Jason finally found his voice.

I huffed.

"He's..." His voice trailed off.

"Tall?" I suggested. "Intense? Gorgeous?"

"In love with you," Jason replied. "I was going to say that he's so obviously in love with you. The way he looks at you... I would kill to have someone look at me like that."

After work, I went straight to Dylan's house. I didn't go home and change first. I didn't even call. I just showed up on his doorstep, pissed.

"Rain, come in."

"What the fuck was that?" I snarled. "You should have told me that he was coming."

"If I had known that having Eric at the office would get you back into my house, I would have done it a week ago," he smirked.

I gaped at him. "Are you trying to be funny? This is so not funny, Dylan!"

He sobered up. "It was business, Rain. Nothing else."

"Bullshit!" I shouted. "You intentionally blindsided me! If it was just business then there was absolutely no reason not to warn me."

"If I had told you ahead of time then you would have hidden in the server room," he replied calmly.

"Well of course I would have!"

"I didn't want that. I wanted things to play out naturally."

"What the fuck are you talking about?" I shouted.

"Do you know how long it took him to agree to my proposal? Two minutes. I hadn't even finished explaining the project. He would have agreed to anything just to get out of my office and back to you."

"He would have agreed to the job anyway, Dylan. He likes Sheldon. Don't lie to me. This wasn't about business at all. You wanted to see how I would react to him. This was some sort of test. Admit it."

"That's not what it was at all."

"You're so full of shit. You purposefully put us in the same room to see if we were going to fuck or fight. You treated us both like shit. You hurt both of us for no valid fucking reason. I have told you over and over how toxic we are but you can't accept it. For some unknown reason, you seem to think that I'm going to run back into his arms the second that I lay eyes on him. What you did, that was just fucking cruel."

"I'm sorry, Rain," he sighed. "It wasn't like that at all. It was just business."

"You keep telling yourself that," I snapped. "Maybe someday you'll believe it, because to me, it's a waste of air. You could have gotten him on the project without having to ambush us. But I'll tell you this for free; the second that he finds out that I ever let you touch me, he's out. He'll never finish a single thing for your project so you might want to find yourself a backup artist now."

"Rain, wait!" he called as I walked out.

"No!" I shouted back. "I can't even look at you right now."

I stood under the soothing spray of the showerhead long enough for my skin to prune but it didn't alleviate my turmoil. The phone was ringing when I stepped out and I answered it.

"Hello."

"Rain?" Ryan's voice comforted me more than the water had. "What's wrong?"

"How can you tell something's wrong from 'hello'?"

"You answered the phone," he explained. "You never answer the phone."

"If you thought I wasn't going to answer then why did you call?"

"You always call back," he replied. "What's wrong? Do I need to come over?"

"Aren't you working tonight?"

"I work every night," he said. "You're more important."

"No, I'm not," I argued. "What you're doing for Tony and his son, that's more important."

"Tell me what happened, Babe," he urged.

"I'm just tired of the games, Minx." I sighed and glanced up at the ceiling. "I'm just tired."

"What games?"

I took a deep breath and slowly let it out. "I don't think this thing with Dylan is going to work."

"Shit," he breathed. "I'm coming over."

"Do you know that you're naked?" he asked when I opened the door.

"Yeah." I glanced down. "Sorry. I'll put something on."

"Don't worry about it," he smirked. "I've seen you naked before. Besides, it's your house. It's your prerogative to be naked if you feel like it."

He followed me into the bedroom and watched as I slipped on a pair of shorts. "What happened with Dylan?"

I sank down to the floor and he sat on the edge of the bed. The bed was high enough that his feet didn't quiet reach the floor.

I reached out and skipped my fingers over the bas-relief of the chest beside me. "Have you ever looked at this?"

"Not really," he said. "What's in it?"

"Toys," I told him.

"It's a toy box?"

"The adult kind of toys," I explained. "Dildos, vibrators, cock rings, restraints, a collar, a couple of floggers, a paddle..."

Ryan smirked. "So they were right about you and your proclivities."

I shrugged. "I guess. What's in it isn't important though. It's the piece itself that's important."

He hopped off the bed to get a closer look. "When I've been in here, I haven't been paying attention to the furniture." He studied the erotic scene carved into the top of the chest lid. "Holy shit. This is you. Is this Eric?"

"Yes. I forget that you've never met him." I flattened my palm over the image on the front of the chest. "Eric made this for me when I first moved in with him."

"I can't believe that I never saw this," he said. "This is..."

"Pornographic?" I offered. The chest was three foot by two foot and had a graphically rendered carving of Eric and me in a different sexual position on each side.

"Beautiful," he corrected and ran his fingers over the top. He squatted down to examine the scenes on the front and sides of the chest. "Is there one on the back too?"

"Yes," I replied. "Spooning."

"Can I see?"

"Yes." I slid the chest away from the wall so he could look at the back. The image on the top was of us in a standard missionary position. The front of the chest showed us in Eric's favorite position, horizontal, back to front. The right side of the chest had me in his lap, riding him, face to face. The left side image was my favorite. We were both on our knees, facing forward. He was behind me with his mouth on my neck and his arms wrapped around me. "When I first met him, his work was very violent, bloody. After this, his stuff became far more sexual. There were still times when he would do something that was just plain gory; but, for the most part, his work was sensual and erotic."

"He fell in love," Ryan suggested.

"I know that he loves me. I love him so much, Ryan. It tears me up inside that we just can't seem to be together. He can never tell me what he's thinking or feeling and I'm not a mind reader. I can't seem to do anything right for him because he won't tell me what he needs or wants. He's not getting whatever it is that he needs and so he goes elsewhere for it. He cheated on me but it's not about sex. There was never a lack of that. It's something emotional that he's feeling the lack of that makes him step out and I don't know how to make it right."

He nodded. "You're not communicating."

"Not effectively," I agreed. "We just end up screaming at each other. I know that I'm not good enough for him. I know that. I can't make him happy. I know it's me. I just don't know what to do about it. There's something wrong with me that I can't figure out how to provide what he needs. I don't know how this happened. I used to be so tolerant. I used to be able to accept him the way he was. It's not even about him cheating on me. All this started way before that. I don't know what happened to me. I'm the failure. Me. We used to just fit together but something got broken or twisted in me and I can't seem to make it work anymore."

"There's nothing wrong with you, Rain," Ryan argued. "Relationships are hard. Communication is important and you guys don't do it."

"It's not his fault. He's closed off and distant because his parents didn't pay any attention to him, so he doesn't know how to open up," I explained. "I'm not saying it's their fault that he won't talk to me. I just mean that it's the way he was raised. He doesn't know any other way to be and I know that. I should be able to understand. I should be able to help him."

"It's not your fault either, Rain."

"Everything hurts," I said. "Seeing him hurts so much. I just get so angry and out of control every time I'm with him. Not being with him hurts even more. It's killing me. Every night, I come home to an empty apartment and it hurts. I go to bed without him and it hurts. I literally feel like pieces of me are dying inside every day that we're not together. If he's feeling even a small portion of the amount of pain that I am, I don't know how he's surviving it. He isn't like us, Ryan. He never lived on the streets. He never had to cope with the constant terror and the fight just to stay alive. He was never raped or beaten. He's not tough like us. He's hurting and I don't know how to fix it."

"God, Rain. It's not your responsibility to fix everything for him. He's an adult. He is just as much in this mess as you are."

"Dylan brought Eric into the office today and he didn't warn me. He intentionally set us up to run into each other."

"What?" Ryan exclaimed. "Why would he do that? He knows how volatile the situation is, right?"

I nodded. "I don't know why he did it. He says it was just business but I don't believe that. I think he wanted to see how we'd react to each other. I think he was preforming some sick kind of experiment."

"Is it possible that it was just business?" he asked. "Did he gain anything from it?"

I nodded. "He thinks so but I know better. He thinks that Eric agreed to work on the project just to be close to me. Eric would have agreed to work on the project as soon as he found out it was for Sheldon. So the only thing that he really accomplished was hurting me and Eric. I'm afraid that Dylan isn't the person that I think he is. He either intentionally set his lover up to get hurt just for shits and giggles, or he did it for business. Either way, I don't think I can be with him anymore. Even if it was exactly like he said, then he callously put his client's whims before his lover's needs."

"He doesn't know Eric like you do. Maybe he honestly thought he couldn't get Eric's cooperation without the incentive," Ryan suggested, playing the Devil's advocate.

"Then he should have talked to me. He might not know Eric but he knows that I do. I could have helped him get Eric onboard without anyone getting hurt," I argued. "Besides, now Eric knows that I know Dylan. He'll be on the lookout for anything unusual. If Eric finds out that I had sex with Dylan, he'll go ballistic. He won't work for him. Not even if Dylan sues him. There's nothing the courts can do to force an artist to create. He won't do it."

Ryan frowned. "So I guess Dylan shot himself in the foot."

"Exactly."

"Did Eric sign a contract?" he asked.

"I don't know," I admitted.

"Maybe you should warn Eric," he suggested.

"Warn him?"

"Yes. Let him know that he's being played. Tell him to protect himself."

"How can I do that without betraying Dylan or hurting Eric?" I asked.

"Call him and tell him to be very careful about committing to anything. You don't have to explain why."

I shook my head. "I can't. You don't know what it's like talking to him. I lose control of myself. We'd end up fighting and hurting each other."

"Then I'll talk to him," he offered.

"Why? You don't even know him."

"No," he replied. "But I care about you. If Eric gets hurt, it will hurt you too, and I don't want that to happen."

I stared at him, dumbfounded that he would do such a thing for me. "You're a really good person, Ryan. It's too bad that you're not in love with me."

He giggled. "I'm half in love with your cock, if that counts."

I laughed. "I take it back. You're a slut," I said and stuck my tongue out at him.

He laughed. "Don't point that thing at me unless you plan on using it."

I had to have a drink, or four, before I worked up the nerve to dial Eric's phone number. While I was bolstering myself with liquid courage, we went over everything Ryan was going to say. I wanted to do this. I felt like Eric had a right to know. I was just scared.

Once I had a good buzz going, I dialed and handed Ryan the phone.

"Oh God, Baby. I'm so glad you called," Eric answered. Obviously he'd gotten Caller ID since I'd moved out.

"It's not Rain. This is Ryan. I'm calling from his phone."

"Ryan?" The menace in Eric's voice was perfectly clear from my position on the couch, approximately two feet away from Ryan.

"I'm Rain's friend," Ryan explained.

"Why are you calling?" he asked. "Is he in trouble?"

"No," Ryan replied. "Did you sign anything today?"

"Sign anything?" Eric asked. "At GWG? No. Why?"

"Rain doesn't really work there. He's on a short term contract that ends next week," Ryan told him.

"Who the fuck are you and why does this have anything to do with you?" Eric snarled.

"I'm Rain's friend," Ryan explained again. "I just want you to be careful before you make any commitments. Be very sure of what you're agreeing to."

"This is for Sheldon," Eric bit back.

"I know," Ryan replied, nonplussed. "I met him. He's cool. We all had dinner together. Just... the firm is not Sheldon and they may not have your best interests at heart."

"I didn't just fall off of the turnip truck." Eric was getting more annoyed by the second. It was time for Ryan to end the call.

"No. I know," Ryan replied. "It's just... If you're in anywhere near as bad of shape as Rain is, you might do something without thinking about it. Just don't make any commitments without bringing your lawyer, ok?"

"Just how stupid do you think I am?"

"I don't think you're stupid at all," Ryan assured him. "But I do think that you might be hurting. Rain seems to think that you hung the moon. And I don't want to have to pick up the pieces when he falls apart because you were too distracted to protect yourself. I need to go. Just think about what I said. Bye."

He hung up the phone and fanned his face.

"I know," I groaned. "He's so fucking sexy."

"Did I do ok?" he asked. "It was so weird. He acted just like you said he would. Almost word for word."

"You did great," I grinned. "Now he's going to call Sheldon to find out about you and, with any luck, Sheldon will take care of him. I hope so anyway. He did before."

"What if Sheldon tells him that you're dating Dylan?"

"Then, hopefully, Sheldon will be as gentle as possible. Eric will know everything and be able to make an informed decision. And I'll expect a bat-shit crazy Eric to show up at the office on a rampage. Then he'll go into a severe depression and Irish will scream at me."

"Jesus Christ," Ryan swore. "Drama."

"Yeah," I replied with a frown.

I must have drank myself into a stupor because I was jolted awake and I didn't know why until I heard voices from the living room.