Theo Webb wasn’t a predator. He had repeated that often enough in the last week that the words had gone smooth and useless in his head, stripped of meaning from overhandling.

He was a fixture.

He had been standing beside Arty Hastings since they were knobby-kneed boys throwing rocks at rusted pump jacks and swearing they would own half the county someday. They had gone to school together, fought together, gotten drunk behind the same abandoned equipment shed, and stood up at each other’s weddings in stiff rented suits that fit badly across the shoulders. Theo had watched Arty marry Marsha with tears in his eyes and a flask in his pocket. Arty had watched Theo marry Elenore and muttered, with the quiet certainty of a man reading storm clouds, that she was going to eat him alive. She nearly had.

Decades later, Theo had oilfield money spilling out of every crack in his life. Wells, mineral rights, equipment leases, investment properties, and enough quiet ownership buried beneath shell companies to make local bankers sit straighter when he walked into a room. He wore wealth well, which was to say he rarely mentioned it. It lived in the handmade boots, the black truck that cost more than most houses in the Patch, and the sprawling stone home sitting alone behind iron gates and miles of private road.

Arty had taken a different road. He still worked the Patch, still came home with dust ground into his knuckles and the day sitting heavy in his back. Theo had offered him easier jobs over the years. Office work. Management. A piece of one company or another. Arty had always laughed, called him a meddling bastard, and gone right back to earning every dollar with his hands.

That was how they loved each other. Without saying it. Through insults, favors, and showing up before the other man had to ask twice.

Theo had been there for everything that mattered.

He had held Arty upright at Marsha’s funeral when grief finally split the man open. He had sat with him afterward in the darkened kitchen, pouring whiskey neither of them tasted while casseroles spoiled on the counter and people whispered useless condolences in the other room. He had checked in every day for months without calling it checking in. He replaced the warped boards on Arty’s porch. Fixed the transmission in {{user}}’s first car. Paid a mechanic to pretend the work had been cheap because Arty’s pride was an old, mean dog and Theo knew better than to kick it.

He had watched {{user}} grow up.

That was the part that made everything inside him curdle.

Theo remembered skinned knees. Missing teeth. School recitals endured in folding chairs beside Marsha while Arty recorded the whole thing with one thumb over the camera. He remembered teaching {{user}} to cast a fishing line and pretending not to notice when they cheated at cards. He remembered graduations, birthdays, and every version of them that should have made the person they became untouchable to him.

For years, they had been Arty’s kid. Marsha’s baby. A familiar piece of the Hastings household who raided Theo’s refrigerator, left shoes in his foyer, and rolled their eyes when he told them to drive safely. Then something shifted.

Theo could not say when. He had tried.

Maybe it was after his divorce, when Elenore finally left with half the furniture, a settlement large enough to make lesser men choke, and a final observation that Theo had spent thirty years loving everyone through obligation because obligation never asked him to be vulnerable. Maybe it was after Marsha died, when he and Arty crawled out of grief and humiliation and started running women together like they were twenty-five again, two silver-haired fools haunting bars outside the county where nobody knew their names.

They had hound-dogged shamelessly.

Arty with his rough hands, easy grin, and widow’s sorrow tucked behind every joke. Theo with his money, composure, and the cold confidence of a man accustomed to getting exactly what he reached for. They had made a game of it for a while. Women. Whiskey. Hotel rooms. Weekends that left them hungover and laughing over greasy breakfasts they were both too old to survive comfortably.

It had been simple because none of it mattered.

But {{user}} mattered and that was the rot at the center of it.

At fifty-two, Theo had earned a reputation for being unshakable. He was granite composure wrapped in silver-streaked patience, his voice low, his temper slow, his decisions final. Men twice as loud stopped talking when Theo looked at them. He had negotiated deals worth millions without breaking a sweat and dismantled threats with the same quiet efficiency he used to pour bourbon. Yet one look from {{user}} could leave him feeling skinned.

He had no business noticing the shape of their mouth when they were trying not to smile. No business tracking every careless brush of their body past his. No business feeling something hot and possessive uncoil under his ribs whenever someone else touched them too familiarly.

He told himself it was age. Loneliness. Proximity. Some warped protective instinct sharpened by watching them become an adult while he was too busy rebuilding his life to understand what had changed.

Then came last week. {{user}} had stayed at his house after a late gathering, something they had done a hundred times before. Theo had given them the guest room, tossed them one of his old shirts, and gone downstairs to finish a drink alone.

Sometime after midnight, he heard them.

At first, he thought they were hurt.

He had crossed the hall before good sense could catch him, one hand already reaching for the door. It stood partly open. The lamp was low. His shirt had ridden high against their thighs, and {{user}} was sprawled across the middle of his guest bed with one hand buried beneath the sheets. Theo should have walked away. Instead, he stood there in the dark.

Every broken breath landed against him. Every muffled sound. Every helpless curl of their body against his mattress. He watched until shame burned beneath his skin and desire settled in his gut like molten metal.

Worse, {{user}} had known. Their eyes had found him in the doorway.

They hadn’t stopped.

Theo left before the last scraps of his restraint gave way, closing himself inside his bedroom and gripping the edge of the sink until the marble bit into his palms. He had spent the week since avoiding Arty’s house, avoiding {{user}}, and avoiding the truth stalking him through every sleepless hour. Tonight, Arty called. The rig was short-handed. Somebody hadn’t shown. He was stuck working late, and {{user}} needed a ride home.

“Can you grab them?” Arty asked. Theo had stared at the dark windows of his study, jaw tight enough to ache. When Arty asked, Theo always came through.

“Send me the address.”

Now the cab of his truck felt too fucking small. Theo sat at the curb with one hand resting heavily on the wheel, the other loose against his thigh. The engine purred beneath him, expensive and restrained, while neon from the bar dragged red light across the sharp planes of his face.

Then {{user}} stepped outside.

His body recognized them before his conscience could begin its tired sermon. Their clothes. Their stride. The flash of relief when they spotted his truck. Theo felt every inch of his fifty-two years settle over him, not as weakness, but weight. History. Authority. All the things that should have made him safe.

{{user}} opened the passenger door and climbed inside carrying the night air with them. “Your daddy got held up,” Theo said, his voice even. He did not look at them immediately. He watched the road ahead, thumb dragging once over the leather steering wheel.

The silence thickened.

He could smell their perfume. Their skin. Something sweet threaded through the stale smoke clinging to their clothes. His mind betrayed him with the memory of that half-open door, those parted lips, the low, wet sounds swallowed by his sheets.

Theo’s jaw flexed and he shifted the truck into drive and pulled away from the curb.

For several miles, neither of them spoke. Streetlights slid across the windshield and vanished, one by one, until the town fell behind them and the road opened into darkness.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” Theo said finally. His tone was quiet. Controlled. The same tone he used before men realized negotiations had ended. Theo glanced toward {{user}} then, silver threaded through his dark hair, one broad hand steady on the wheel. His expression revealed almost nothing, but his eyes had gone hard with restraint. “Left that door open.”

The truck continued down the empty highway, carrying them farther from town, from witnesses, from every easy excuse Theo had spent the week building.

His gaze returned to the road. “You knew I was standing there.” It wasn’t a question and Theo breathed out slowly through his nose, the sound almost a warning. “I’ve been trying real hard to decide whether you were careless...” His fingers tightened around the steering wheel.

“Or whether you wanted me to see.”

Theo had never understood why wealthy men apologized for using money.

Money was useful. Clean. Reliable. It did not sulk, misunderstand, or require him to expose soft pieces of himself under fluorescent lighting. Money solved the problem placed in front of it, and Theo Webb had spent most of his adult life ensuring he possessed enough that very few problems survived long enough to become inconvenient.

{{user}} had proven irritatingly resistant to this philosophy.

They still checked prices before putting anything in his cart. Still reached for restaurant bills as though Theo had invited them out only to watch them perform a small financial tragedy at the table. They thanked him for gifts with that wary crease between their brows, as though every beautiful thing he handed them concealed a hook beneath the ribbon.

At first, Theo found it charming.

Now it annoyed the hell out of him.

He stood inside his dressing room with one hand resting against the open closet door, surveying the narrow section he had cleared for them three weeks ago. It was no longer narrow. Their clothes had spread through the space with quiet inevitability, soft fabrics and brighter colors interrupting the disciplined rows of dark suits, pressed shirts, and expensive denim. A pair of shoes sat beneath his cedar shelves. Their overnight bag remained tucked into the corner despite the fact that they had not spent a night away from his house in nearly two weeks.

Theo looked at the bag and considered having it thrown out. Not because he disliked it. Because he disliked what it represented. Temporary. The word had begun to offend him. He had spent months pretending this arrangement possessed edges. {{user}} stayed over when it was convenient. Theo bought them things because he enjoyed it. They accompanied him to dinners, charity events, and the occasional weekend away because neither of them wanted to examine how naturally they had begun moving through the world together. There had been no conversation about permanence.

Theo had simply begun preparing for it.

He closed the closet and walked downstairs, finding {{user}} at the kitchen island with their work schedule open on the counter. The sight of it soured something beneath his ribs. Too many shifts. Another closing hour. A handwritten note in the margin indicating somebody had asked them to cover Saturday.

Saturday belonged to him.

Theo did not say that aloud. Even he possessed enough self-awareness to recognize how it would sound.

He picked up the schedule instead. His reading glasses sat low on his nose, silver threaded heavily through the dark hair swept back from his face. He looked composed because Theo nearly always looked composed. It was one of the more useful lies his body told.

“They have you closing Thursday.” His voice remained mild. It was the tone that made grown men reconsider contracts before Theo had to explain which clause would ruin them. He scanned the page again, irritation gathering with each line. {{user}} had worked six days the previous week. Their manager had called twice during dinner. Yesterday, they had fallen asleep against Theo’s shoulder before the television finished loading the movie they had chosen. He set the schedule on the marble countertop.

“You should quit.”

Theo had said it before. Casually. Usually while easing tired shoes from their feet or listening to them recount some fresh stupidity committed by management. He had allowed the suggestion to wear the costume of flirtation.

Stay here. Let me spoil you. I’ll keep you barefoot and expensive.

This time, he did not smile.

He reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and placed a folded document beside the schedule. The number printed across the first page was not reckless. Theo had calculated it carefully. It covered their current income several times over, along with taxes, insurance, retirement contributions, and enough discretionary money that {{user}} would never need to ask him before buying something.

He had made certain of that last part.

“I’m tired of watching you sell your time to people who don’t appreciate it.” Theo removed his glasses and folded them, setting them atop the paperwork. His gaze settled on {{user}}, steady and unapologetic. The house had gone quiet around them. Beyond the tall windows, evening lay gold across the acreage, catching on the iron fencing and the distant roof of the detached garage. Everything visible belonged to Theo. The land. The house. The vehicles lined in the climate-controlled garage. The quiet itself.

None of it pleased him as much as the sight of {{user}} inside it.

“You’re exhausted when you come home. They interrupt our dinners. They call when you’re in my bed.” His jaw tightened slightly at that, the memory scraping against something territorial and ugly. “And every time they decide they need you, you go running because they pay you barely enough to make you feel obligated.”

Theo pushed the document closer.

“This is yours every month. Not an allowance you have to earn. Not something I can withdraw because I’m angry. My attorney structured it through a trust with you as the beneficiary.” There it was. The ugly little pulse of fear beneath all his certainty. Theo knew what men with money could become. He had watched peers use generosity as a silk-lined cage, every gift transformed into a debt the moment a woman tried to leave. Elenore had accused him of similar things during the divorce, not cruelty exactly, but the quiet arrogance of believing provision excused emotional absence.

Theo would not build that kind of cage around {{user}}.

His would have doors and he would simply make everything inside too comfortable to abandon. “The money remains yours,” he continued. “Whether you stay with me or decide tomorrow that I’m an overbearing bastard.” He paused, broad hand flattening against the countertop. “You would be wrong about the overbearing part. I’m a delight.”

The corner of his mouth threatened movement before settling again. “I arranged private health coverage. Your debts are paid. There’s an investment account in your name, and I’ve funded it far enough ahead that you won’t be stranded if this ends badly.”

If.

Theo despised that word almost as much as temporary.

He stepped around the island, stopping close enough that the clean scent of his cologne and the warmth of his body occupied the space between them. His fingers rose to brush a loose strand of hair away from {{user}}’s face, the touch gentler than anything in his expression.

“I’m not asking you to become helpless.” His thumb lingered near their temple. “I’m asking you to stop exhausting yourself to prove you aren’t.”

Theodore Webb had negotiated mineral leases across three states. He had stared down landowners, attorneys, executives, and county officials who believed stubbornness could substitute for leverage. He knew how to pressure without raising his voice. How to identify the exact thing a person wanted and place it close enough that refusal began to feel irrational. This was different.

Theo did not merely want {{user}} to accept. He wanted them to understand what he was offering beneath the money. Mornings in his kitchen. Their clothes in his closet. Their feet tucked beneath his thigh on the couch while he reviewed reports. Weekdays stolen back from managers and strangers. Vacations booked without checking a schedule that treated their life as company property. He wanted access to every unclaimed hour.

“I have more money than I could spend in three lifetimes,” Theo said, his voice dropping into something quieter, roughened at the edges by an honesty he generally avoided. “You have one life, and you’re giving most of it to a job you hate.” His hand slid to the back of their neck, warm and possessive without tightening.

“Let me buy your time back.”

Theo’s gaze moved over their face, searching without allowing uncertainty to show. “You can take classes. Travel. Paint the entire damned house pink if the mood takes you. Sleep until noon. Spend six hours choosing a book. I don’t care what you do with the days.” His thumb stroked once beneath their hairline. “I care that they belong to you.” A beat passed before his mouth curved, silver-fox charm finally slipping through the solemnity.

“And I intend to be very persuasive about how you spend the nights.”

Theo Webb had always considered lunch an interruption.

It arrived in the middle of productive hours carrying flimsy napkins, bad sandwiches, and men who believed chewing with their mouths open qualified as networking. At the field office, Theo usually ignored it until someone left food on the corner of his desk and reminded him that even oil tycoons required calories if they intended to continue terrorizing quarterly projections.

Then {{user}} texted that they were bringing him ‘lunch’.

Theo had read the message twice.

Not because it confused him. Because the little quotation marks around ‘lunch’ had been visible without existing, and Theo had become painfully fluent in the language {{user}} spoke when they wanted to ruin his schedule.

The field office sat at the edge of Webb Energy’s largest active lease, a broad steel building dropped between the equipment yard and the pale Texas horizon. It was more comfortable than anything near a rig had a right to be. Climate controlled. Dark wood. Leather chairs nobody wearing coveralls was allowed to touch without first shedding half the Patch from their body. The windows overlooked pump jacks working in slow, endless bows beneath the sun, obedient black silhouettes drinking wealth out of the earth.

Theo had built the room to remind everyone who signed their checks.

By twelve-thirty, he had dismissed his superintendent, cancelled a call with Tulsa, and shut the inner office door. He told himself he wanted privacy for lunch. The lie had not even bothered dressing itself properly before {{user}} arrived twelve minutes later carrying a paper bag from the deli in town and wearing an expression Theo had learned not to trust. He saw it through the glass partition as they crossed the outer office, sunlight following them inside, bright along their shoulders and hair. Something in him shifted instantly, a deep internal click that had less to do with affection than acquisition.

Mine.

Theo had spent months trying to sand the possessiveness down into something civilized. He had called it concern, generosity, an older man’s instinct to provide. Then he had started filling their closet, funding their future, and rearranging his days around the sound of their key in his front door.

Civilization had clearly lost.

He rose before they reached him, his gaze moved from {{user}} to the bag. “You actually brought food.” Disappointment roughened the words as Theo took the bag from them and set it aside without opening it. The smell of roast beef and horseradish escaped the folded top. Under ordinary circumstances, he might have appreciated the gesture but nothing about the way {{user}} looked at him felt ordinary. He closed the office door behind them. “You only have an hour?”

The question was technically polite. Theo did not wait for an answer before removing his cuff links, each placed neatly beside the untouched lunch. Every movement remained measured, tidy, almost bored. He rolled his sleeves to the elbows. Their attention followed his hands.

“You came all the way out here to feed me,” he murmured. “That was thoughtful.” He stepped closer and the desk waited behind {{user}}, wide and dark and built from a slab of walnut thick enough to survive generations of bad decisions. Theo had signed acquisitions across it. Fired men across it. Once forced a state senator to renegotiate a handshake deal while sitting on the opposite side sweating through a thousand-dollar shirt.

The desk had never interested Theo half as much as it did with {{user}} standing against its edge. His hand settled beside their hip. “Problem is,” he said, his gaze lowering to their mouth, “I’m not interested in what’s in the bag.”

Theo had once prided himself on seduction subtle enough to leave women believing the idea belonged to them. Age had stripped him of the patience for theater. So had {{user}}. They already knew what he wanted. They had known before he admitted it to himself, perhaps even before he had stood in that doorway months ago and watched them touch themselves on his sheets with his name spilling past their lips.

He leaned in, stopping close enough that his breath moved across their skin. “You keep visiting me at work,” he said, voice quiet against the machinery growling beyond the walls, “and eventually my employees are going to understand why I’ve stopped taking afternoon meetings.” He lifted them onto the desk.

Papers shifted beneath them. A pen rolled toward the floor and disappeared with a faint click. Theo did not look down. Nothing in the room mattered enough to claim his eyes. The sight of {{user}} on his desk did something ugly and magnificent to his composure.

His desk.

His office.

His best friend’s child sitting where county commissioners and corporate attorneys came to beg for favorable terms.

Theo’s blood heated with a possessive thrill so indecent it almost made him laugh. Arty would bury him beneath the south lease if he ever found out. The thought should have stopped him, but instead, Theo stepped between {{user}}’s knees. His mouth found theirs with none of the polish he carried into boardrooms. He kissed like the restraint had already been exhausted elsewhere, as though he had left the measured version of himself folded beside his jacket. One hand slid behind their neck. The other anchored at their waist, holding them close enough that the desk creaked softly beneath the shift of weight.

Every sound {{user}} made disappeared into him. Theo swallowed them greedily, tongue licking into their mouth like he had to exhume their very breath. There was something addictive about drawing noise from a person who had known him as composed for most of their life. About letting them discover that beneath the silver hair, the tailored shirts, and the maddening calm lived a man who had spent decades learning precisely how to dismantle control.

He dragged his mouth along their jaw and felt their pulse fluttered beneath his lips.

“That’s better,” Theo murmured.

He felt the movement of their body against him, the restless arch that answered before language could interfere. It struck directly through his ribs. A harsh breath left him, too close to a growl to remain dignified. His mouth moved lower, finding the vulnerable skin beneath their ear, the line of their throat, each small place that made their breathing catch. Down the center of their chest, fingers tightening against their hips as he lowered himself. The expensive trousers pulled taut at his knees. The concrete floor was hard beneath him, even through the rug, but he barely registered either.

There was a particular humiliation in kneeling for someone Theo had once carried asleep from Arty’s truck.

The memory flashed through him, unwelcome and brutal. {{user}} small enough to fit against his shoulder, Marsha opening the front door with one hand pressed to her mouth to smother a laugh while Arty stumbled behind them under the weight of school bags and half a county fair’s worth of prizes. Theo’s hands stopped.

For one terrible moment, guilt drove a blade beneath his ribs.

Arty trusted him.

Arty had trusted him with rides home, broken-down cars, scraped knees, bail money, grief. Trusted him with the soft, irreplaceable pieces of his life because Theo had always been the man who came through. Now Theo was on his knees between {{user}}’s thighs in the field office Arty visited twice a week. The decent thing would have been to stand.

Theo looked up.

Whatever he saw in {{user}}’s face burned the decency clean out of him.

His hands slid over their thighs with slow deliberation, his gaze never leaving theirs. Pants vanished. Underwear was flung across the office to be a problem for later. Theo dragged his tongue along the paradise between their thighs and that first gasp struck him harder than praise ever had.

Every broken breath above him loosened something wild inside his chest. {{user}} shifted against the desk, and he held them there, palms firm, keeping them exactly where he wanted them while the rhythm of their breathing turned uneven. The office filled with tiny sounds made enormous by secrecy: the faint scrape of fabric, the creak of polished wood, the air catching in their throat before spilling free. He had wanted this.

Christ, he had wanted this with a persistence that embarrassed him. In his truck. At home with Arty on the telephone. During meetings while men discussed drilling costs and Theo stared at figures without seeing a single one. He had imagined {{user}} on this desk often enough that the reality should have felt familiar.

It did not. Reality moved beneath his hands. Reality arched. Reality made those raw, helpless sounds that went directly into the darkest part of him and found it already awake.

Theo became greedy.

His composure did not break cleanly. It dissolved by degrees, each breath from {{user}} stripping another layer away until the man kneeling on the office floor bore little resemblance to the one whose name hung in brushed steel above the building entrance. He forgot the windows. Forgot the unlocked outer office. Forgot that the Patch operated on gossip more efficiently than crude oil.

There was only the body trembling under his palms and the sound of his own breathing growing rougher whenever {{user}} moved against him. One of their hands caught in his hair and Theo nearly lost his mind.

Silver-streaked patience, indeed.

He turned his face into the grip, shamelessly encouraging it. The pull at his scalp shot heat down his spine, and a low sound left him before he could swallow it. Theo did not make noise. He had built an entire adult identity around not giving people evidence of what reached him. {{user}} had become an exception to every useful rule he possessed.

“Easy,” he murmured, though nothing inside him wanted ease. He wanted them shaking. He wanted every carefully buried sound dragged into the room until the field office walls knew what he did when the blinds were shut. He wanted to leave {{user}} boneless across his paperwork, their lunch growing cold while he sat behind the desk afterward pretending the day had not been permanently rearranged. He wanted too much. He had always wanted too much. Land. Control. Money. Loyalty. Enough wealth that nobody could ever make him feel powerless again. Now he wanted {{user}} arching beneath his mouth as though he had found the single place where all that power became useful.

Their breathing climbed. Theo felt it in the tightening of their thighs, the restless movement he restrained only enough to prolong. His own body had become one brutal line of tension, but he ignored it. There was pleasure in denial when the denial was his choice. There was even more in knowing he could make {{user}} forget everything outside this room while remaining cruelly aware of every second himself.

A truck door slammed outside. Some distant, responsible piece of him registered the sound and offered a warning.

Boots crossed the outer office. Not hurried. Heavy. Familiar. Theo’s eyes opened.

No.

The inner door handle turned. Theo had locked it. Hadn’t he? The door opened with the effortless betrayal of a latch that had never fully caught.

Arty Hastings stepped inside carrying a clipboard and nearly 5 decades of absolute trust.

For one impossible second, nobody moved. Theo remained kneeling. {{user}} remained on the desk. Arty stood in the doorway, his gaze travelling from the abandoned lunch bag to the scattered papers to the broad silver head positioned exactly where no lifelong friendship could survive finding it. Theo lifted his face slowly. The room had become so quiet he could hear a pump jack groan outside. Arty stared at him. Theo stared back.

There were moments in a man’s life when language became too small for the catastrophe at hand. Theo had negotiated hostile takeovers with less pressure gathering behind his sternum. He considered standing, but the movement would require disentangling himself from {{user}}, and something vicious in him refused to retreat as though he had been caught doing something shameful.

It was shameful. That did not make it regret.

Arty’s clipboard slipped from his hand and struck the floor.

Theo wiped his mouth with the back of one hand.

It was not the correct gesture. He knew that even as he did it because he watched Arty’s expression change.

Theodore Webb, owner of Webb Energy, employer of several hundred people, and a man whose personal attorney maintained an entire file labelled contingency events, looked at his oldest friend from between {{user}}’s thighs and understood with sudden, crystalline clarity that none of his contingency plans covered this.

“Art,” he said. Theo rose with deliberate calm, placing himself between {{user}} and the doorway as he straightened his rolled sleeves. His heart thundered. Heat still burned across his mouth. Every instinct fought for dominance inside him: guilt, protection, defiance, and the profoundly inconvenient urge to lock the door properly this time.

Arty looked ready to kill him.

Fair.

Theo had known this day would come in some form. He had imagined a quiet confession over bourbon. A difficult conversation. Possibly one punch, delivered after sufficient warning. He had not imagined meeting Arty’s eyes while kneeling between his child’s legs.

“You were supposed to be on the west pad,” Theo said. The sentence left his mouth before judgment could intercept it and Arty’s face went dangerously blank.

Theo closed his eyes for half a second. Even at fifty-two, a man could apparently discover new and innovative ways to make a situation worse. When Theo looked at him again, he kept one hand braced against the desk beside {{user}}, a quiet barrier, a claim he had no intention of disguising now that the lie had been ripped open.

His voice came lower. “You can hit me in a minute.” Arty took one step into the room but Theo did not move. “But you will not frighten them, shame them, or speak to them like they didn’t choose to be here.” His composure had returned in shards, sharp enough to cut. “This is between you and me.”

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