79. Dex

Why the fuck I'm standing on Sunningdale's fifth tee on a cold, crisp Saturday morning with Rafe, Zach and Cal I have no clue.

All I know is this: I'm not here to play golf.

My game is pretty rusty. I've played here and there over the past decade, mainly in Connecticut at the invitation of generous colleagues, but I certainly wasn't a member of any club while I was stateside. These three aren't half bad at it, though.

Cal can drive the ball for miles, though his putting at the last few tees has been a bit hit and miss. Rafe's game is solid. Skilful. And Zach takes so long lining up his shot that he might want to think about switching to chess. I can see him mentally triangulating ground gradient and wind speed and distance for every shot, but it works for him, because most of them are bang-on.

Rafe and Cal are both members here, and it's a stunning course. Given our early tee time, there's no buildup of other players in front of us, though given Zach's constant prevaricating I suspect there'll soon be a line behind us. Forgoing my Saturday lie-in and extricating myself from between two warm bodies this morning was brutal, but Zach and Cal have kids to get back to, so it makes sense to do this early.

We talk about work, naturally, as we walk.

‘How's the deal going?' Zach asks, his eyes on the distant green, where our balls lie.

‘The interest level is insane,' I confess, ‘and that's without Max having gone on the road yet. It's going to be a total fucking shit show, I can feel it.'

Banks always hope for a "hot" deal, which is industry speak for a deal whose shares are oversubscribed. But when there's as much demand as I suspect there will be for Wolff, it can turn into a giant headache. Every investor wants a decent allocation, and very few of them will get what they want.

If I had to guess at this moment, I'd say most people will end up getting ten percent of what they requested or less, which will make for some very unhappy clients.

‘It's only going to get worse,' Rafe says sagely. ‘He's bloody impressive.'

‘Yeah,' I agree noncommittally.

‘And how are you finding Loeb?' Cal asks.

I sigh. ‘Lovely people. Great culture. It's no Goldman, that's for sure. The research is great, and Wolff was a win, but honestly, we have a mountain to climb to make our mark.'

‘Not easy when there's so little business to go around,' Zach remarks, dropping his clubs next to his ball, which is the only one that actually made it onto the green, and retrieving his putter.

‘Exactly,' I say, my gaze flickering between his face and his ball. It seems like a fairly straightforward shot on a flattish green, so what he's computing, I have no idea.

‘Fuck's sake,' Cal groans. ‘We'll be here all day.'

‘You just want to get to the halfway house and stuff your face,' Zach retorts without taking his eye off his ball.

‘Quite right. I won't play well until I have a bacon roll in my stomach,' Cal says.

‘Thought you didn't do carbs,' Zach points out.

‘Golf course carbs don't count. I'll do twenty thousand steps today.'

‘Can't wait to see you smash the back nine, then,' Rafe says. ‘You know,' he whispers to me, taking a step away from Mr Concentration, ‘if the uphill battle ever gets too much, you can always join Cerulean. We're still tiny—it's mainly our money and our mates' funds, as you know—but we're seriously considering trying to grow this thing properly. Everyone wants to ramp up their family time these days, so bringing more hands on deck makes sense, and there's no better person I can think of than you to lead the charge.'

‘Thanks, mate,' I say, genuinely touched. ‘I'll bear that in mind.' True, Cerulean's assets under management are a drop in the ocean right now, but their performance across asset classes is fucking impressive, and it would be a fun challenge to see how much they could grow their assets without sacrificing performance.

It's definitely an option to tuck away for the future. It's hard enough seeing Darcy and Max as it is with all of our crazy schedules. I can barely allow myself to imagine a time when we might be fully committed to each other, practically as well as emotionally. I want it too badly, and it hurts too much given what I need to do to get us there.

‘Of course,' he says. ‘You're family now. Oh, Jesus fuck.'

The last is in response to Zach's eventual, perfectly executed putt. The ball rolls obediently into the hole, Zach punches the air, and the rest of us groan.

Cal steps up to his ball to forge bravely on with his putting despite his empty stomach. He hits it far too hard and it rolls straight past the hole.

‘Fucking useless,' Zach crows.

‘Speaking of family,' Rafe continues with a sideways glance at me as he lines up his shot, ‘have you had any more thoughts on what you're going to do on that front?'

I understand him perfectly. I had a good chat with him and Belle about it a couple of weeks back when they kindly came over to the City for a midweek supper.

‘I thought I might get you to fill Dad in,' I quip. ‘You're far better with him than I am.'

‘Happy to,' he replies, his tone smooth as he chips the ball onto the green, but it lands a couple of inches from the hole. ‘Shite. But I don't think he'd appreciate my delivery.'

‘I know,' I say in a small voice.

He nudges the ball into the hole, retrieves it, and walks with me to my ball. ‘Is that your way of saying you've decided to come out with it all?'

I eye up my shot as I consider my response. I won't get it in one, but I should be able to make the next shot a dead cert.

‘I know what I have to do,' I say as I take my shot. As I predicted, it lands a couple of feet from the hole.

‘Yeah?' is all he says.

My situation has gone around and around and around in my head like clothes trapped in an endless washing cycle, and I'm so fucking exhausted. I pride myself on being a strategic thinker, a problem solver, but this one has me beaten.

‘I'm not missing anything, am I?' I ask the guys now as we haul our golf bags onto our shoulders and trudge towards the next tee. ‘This isn't a false binary?' I'm so well educated and intellectually superior that I loathe false binaries—situations where you think there are only two options and there's actually a third way.

‘You know your parents far better than we do,' Zach says, ‘except for maybe Rafe, so I don't want to speak out of line. But it seems to be this is a real dilemma, mate. The only compromises are so risky or so unsatisfactory that you're most likely better off taking charge of the situation yourself.'

‘Talk me through them,' I say, and while a part of me despises myself for asking the advice of people I don't know all that well, I also know I'm far too close to this, and far too emotional over it, to turn down additional perspectives from these guys. They're smart, they're family, they care, and they understand these things.

Rafe's lived through it with my sister; they've all seen how Gen was apparently ostracised over the years, because she dared to run a sex club, and I know Zach has come a long way on his journey from grief and guilt to embracing a less orthodox lifestyle, largely thanks to Maddy.

If three guys educated at Loyola, a Catholic school even more conservative than my own school, Ampleforth, can untangle themselves from the bounded, doctrine-heavy form of love they were taught throughout their formative years and emerge whole and healed and happy, then so can I.

‘The way I see it, coming out publicly and to your parents is the only viable option other than breaking things off with Max and risking losing Darcy, too,' Rafe says bluntly. ‘The compromises Zach mentioned are inadequate. Come out and know that your dad will hear about it on the City grapevine?'

He sucks a sharp breath in through his teeth. ‘Risky. Or fudge it for as long as you can and keep a low profile, but from what you've told me, Max won't go for that at all.' He stops walking and looks at me. ‘But more importantly, mate, this is your fucking life. Forget what you owe Max and Darcy for a sec and think about what you owe yourself.'

It's so similar to what Max said about choosing myself that it gives me pause.

‘It doesn't sound like a fair playing field,' Zach says. ‘No offence, but your Dad's not a rational entity, so the game is rigged. From what I know, he won't be happy unless you marry a nice Catholic girl, produce lots of Catholic babies and spend every Sunday going to Mass. But even then he probably won't be happy, because you're not praying enough or being Catholic enough—he's a bottomless fucking pit, so you need to be the one to set rational, healthy boundaries that you can live with, because he sure as hell won't.'

‘Been hanging with your wife much?' Rafe asks him, and Zach laughs. ‘Seriously, that day when your dad kicked off at Belle and we got Maddy over—the boundary chat she gave Belle was un-fucking-believable. Sounds like you've learnt from the best.'

‘That's my girl,' Zach says, his grin that of a man helplessly, hopelessly smitten. ‘She's actually fucking good on boundaries. I'll send her your way if you need her.'

I imagine Maddy laying into me and laugh a little. ‘I think Belle's passed most of it on to me. But what you said about Dad being irrational—that resonates, and it's what I keep coming back to. Because there's no doubt in my mind that I want to move forward with Max and Darcy. I really—I love them both so, so much.

‘But I know I'll lose him as soon as I tell him. He'll probably kick me out, but even if he doesn't, I know I'll never be able to introduce the man and woman I love to him and have him give them the respect they deserve. So that's going to be it, pretty much.'

Cal groans. ‘Shit, mate. It's so fucking tough.'

‘Yeah.' We've reached the next tee, but none of us have made a move to play. I rake my hand through my hair. ‘But, as you say, I'll never make him happy. That really helps. Nothing I do will make him happy unless I live a life that's one-hundred percent false to me, so when you put it like that, the only thing I can do is choose my own happiness. Any other outcome would be a fucking joke.'

‘The thing I remember most about that afternoon,' Rafe says, ‘is that Maddy told Belle she wasn't responsible for her father's reactions. He's a grown man, and he's chosen his own belief system, but you get to choose yours. You're responsible for your actions, and he's responsible for his.

‘Don't even think about trying to take on the burden of whatever emotional reaction he has, whether it's grief or disgust or genuine fear for the damnation of your eternal soul—that is not your burden to bear. You hear me? I think that's been the biggest shift Belle's had to make, but absolving herself from that has allowed her to live for her own joy and not his approval.'

Fuck, that hits hard. And Rafe may actually be Yoda. How I ever suspected this guy may be morally questionable, I have no clue. Turns out I'm as bad as my father with all that insidious, hardwired Catholic judgement.

‘You're totally right. And it's so easy to forget. I think I needed to hear that out loud. Thanks mate. It's just so fucking hard to walk into a room and know that you'll devastate the man who raised you, even if you wholeheartedly disagree with the basis of his devastation.'

‘If it's any consolation,' Rafe says slowly, like he's choosing his words, ‘I'm sure your dad loves you as much as he's capable. I really don't think he's had unconditional love modelled for him—he doesn't have that within himself to give. He's confused morals with love, and all that extremist shit in his head has made him fearful.

‘But Darcy and Max love you unconditionally, and mate, you deserve that. You deserve to choose that for yourself—every single human deserves knowing how it feels to be loved wholly and unconditionally, no matter what filthy sinners the Church thinks we are. If people put conditions on their love, I'd argue it's not real love.'

Unconditional love.

God is love.

Love is love.

Jesus Christ, he's so fucking right.