Chapter 6
Swearing, Jason slammed his record book closed and leaned back in his desk chair. Ever since Elizabeth had left his office, he'd been extremely worried. He was used to her overdramatic ways and constant scheming, but this one had him on edge. She was doing research on Johnny's fiancé for Christ's sakes, and she obviously intended on doing something with whatever dirt she managed to find.
Not that Lulu Spencer had any skeletons in her closet.
She didn't strike Jason as the kind of woman to have parts of her past that she regretted or wanted to hide from the rest of the world. Hell, he was pretty sure if his friend sat Lulu down with a questionnaire, the blonde would willingly answer every single question, especially if it meant getting Elizabeth's approval.
Sighing, he dug into his jeans pocket for his cell phone, telling himself that he could just ask what she was planning, and not necessarily have to get involved.
"Son of a bitch," he hissed, tossing his phone onto his desk when her voicemail picked up.
There was no doubt in his mind that she had completely ignored his call. She knew that he knew she was up to something and would try to stop her, but didn't realize he'd much rather leave her alone.
But leaving Elizabeth Webber alone meant trouble.
Like the time he'd gone into Manhattan during the middle of the week, and she said she would sit in his office and man the phones and faxes while he was gone. He called three times on his way into the city, and on the first call she sounded fine, by the second she sounded slightly annoyed, and then came the third where she was just far too happy. Despite his all important meeting, he turned his car around and headed back to Port Charles to find that she was having an early happy hour for the employees. When he reminded her that she was supposed to be working, she replied with, "The phone wasn't ringing, and the faxes weren't coming, and I wasn't going to sit around all day and count coffee beans."
That wasn't as bad as the time that she managed to get evicted from her apartment, which she said was a bad incident taken completely out of context, and she'd crashed at his penthouse for nearly a month. It wasn't that he minded her company, or the fact that she left wet towels and bras everywhere and always drank his last beer. No, it was the fact that while he'd gone out of town for barely twelve hours, just another trip into the city and back, he returned to not only find his penthouse in shambles, but to find Elizabeth making out with Ritchie on his pool table.
His fucking pool table.
If anyone was going to make out on it, it was Jason, not his fucking security guard.
When he pointed this out, she rolled her eyes and forced Ritchie to leave, teasing that Jason had ruined her chance at getting laid on the pool table. He told her to go to Jake's where someone would surely take her up on the offer, and she laughed at first, but then admitted she didn't really want to sleep with anyone.
He knew that her outburst, like the many she had when O'Brien first left town, was just a reaction to her friend's absence. He tried to see it from her point of view; that for so long it had been the three of them and since his accident it had been her and Johnny, so he figured it was understandable that she felt abandoned.
Not that he knew anything about that.
After his accident, he'd woken up to a family that wanted nothing to do with him because he was no longer their golden child, and he made the decision then and there that he would never need anyone to the point that it caused him to self-destruct. Even now, he rarely leaned on anyone, and found that he appreciated it more when they came to him, even though it was usually only Johnny and Elizabeth who ever needed his help.
It was different with them. They wanted to be in Jason Morgan's life, and in turn, it caused him to want them in his. For years, he wondered if they looked at him and saw Jason Quartermaine, or worse, if they waited for the person he was to reappear. If they did, they never really showed it, and it was in rare moments like this afternoon when Elizabeth brought up a story he had no recollection of, that he even remembered they knew him before.
Times like that were more awkward for Elizabeth than Jason himself. He mostly felt guilty that he couldn't remember what she spoke about with such amusement and happiness in her eyes. Shortly after his accident, he made it clear that he wanted to know nothing about Jason Quartermaine, and his friends accepted it, though he could tell they didn't understand why he wanted to know nothing about this other person.
They couldn't understand that acting as if Jason Quartermaine had never even existed made it a lot easier to know the face in his bathroom mirror.
He glanced at the door when there was a knock from the other side, taking a deep breath before he called for them to come in.
"Well, look at the man all hard at work," Johnny said, cracking a huge smile as he stepped into the office and closed the door behind him.
"Someone has to handle it all while you're backpacking through Europe," he replied, sliding the record books off to the side, knowing if his friend was sticking around, he wasn't going to get any work done.
"I would hardly call my stay backpacking," he said, adjusting his suit jacket as he sat down across from Jason. "Though it may have been just as rough."
"Oh, sure, seedy pubs and foreign women," he murmured, leaning back in his seat and grinning at his friend. "All the while I was stuck here with numbers and coffee beans."
"And Elizabeth," Johnny pointed out, arching an eyebrow at him.
"Yeah," Jason agreed, nodding his head. "Cleaning up your messes as usual."
O'Brien's eyes flashed briefly to his, and he couldn't decide if his was mad or embarrassed at being called out.
"You got off easy," he said, scratching at the barely visible stubble on his chin. "I left a far bigger mess overseas."
"I wouldn't be sure about that," he replied, getting up from the desk and grabbing the record books. He dug through his pocket as he walked over to the row of file cabinets that lined the back wall of the room.
"Don't be such a hard ass, Jason," his friend muttered, rolling his eyes.
"I'm not," he replied, unlocking the top drawer and tossing the books inside. "I'm just being honest."
Turning back around, he wasn't surprised that he was met with an icy glare. O'Brien shifted uncomfortably and tugged nervously at his tie. "A lot has changed since I left," he said seriously, pulling at the tie until it hung loosely at his neck.
"Depends on how you look at it," Jason shrugged, sitting back down across from him.
Johnny had a tendency to ignore the truth, even if it was staring him in the face. In his friend's eyes, he'd been gone for a year and it seemed all too possible that Elizabeth would have moved on and let go, especially since he already had.
And this was why his friend was such an idiot.
"Numbers are higher than ever," he murmured, switching over to his business tone that Jason rarely ever heard. "You've done really well for the business here in the states, and I even managed to bring in a handful of accounts overseas. The company's never done this well."
"Your father would be proud," he agreed, partly because Johnny needed the satisfaction of knowing he'd done well.
"And…you and Elizabeth are close again," O'Brien said hesitantly, his eyes finally meeting Jason's for the first time since his friend decided to call him out in a roundabout way.
"We are close," he said firmly, finding it impossible not to notice the flicker in Johnny's eyes as he ignored his friend's reference to the past.
Something felt very territorial about Jason's confirmation of this simple fact, which was the last thing he intended, but his friend seemed to get the point.
"I get it," O'Brien replied, tapping a finger against the wooden arm of his chair. His fingernail scraped at a crack where the wood was splitting. "I'm sorry."
"You need to talk to her," he shrugged, not wanting to make an awkward situation even worse.
"I know," he said earnestly, wincing as a piece of the wood stabbed beneath his nail. "I just-I'm trying make sure Lulu's comfortable with everything, and Elizabeth being so distant just…" His voice trailed off and he swallowed hard.
First and foremost, Johnny O'Brien was his friend, which meant he had all rights to call him out when he fucked up, and right now, he was royally fucking up. Jason almost felt guilty for confronting him on something that really had nothing to do with him, but he was the one who'd been here for the last year, so it only seemed fair that he had a voice.
"You showed up with a woman on your arm," Jason reminded him, raking a hand through his hair. Confrontations always made him uncomfortable. He figured it had something do with the fact that he woke up from his accident and was immediately on the defense with everyone around him. "And Lulu is clearly not just a random woman."
"That's why I'm marrying her," he replied seriously, sitting up in his chair. "She may seem uptight to you guys, but she's really not. She's funny and smart, and she gets me…You know, I went through a lot when I left, and she and I just-We clicked from the moment we met."
"I understand," he said, holding up his hand in an attempt to have his friend spare him the details.
The less he knew about Johnny and Lulu the better, because whatever he found out, he'd have to report to Elizabeth, and it would only make things worse. He'd played the middle man for years, and while it never bothered him before, this was one situation he didn't want to get in between.
"What happened with-" He started to stay, but was cut off by the opening of the door behind him.
Elizabeth burst into the office, a jacket over one arm and her purse on the other. "I left my phone here," she said, shoving her messy curls out of her face and glancing around the room.
So, she hadn't ignored his call.
For a few seconds she was oblivious to the man sitting across from Jason, and it wasn't until she stepped passed him to come around to the other side of the desk, the she realized who it was.
"Oh, Johnny," she said flatly, sucking in a breath as she shifted her jacket to hide her shaky hands.
"Hey yourself, Webber," he replied, smiling uncomfortably as his and Jason's unfinished conversation continued to hang in the air.
"You boys talking coffee?" she asked weakly.
"No," Jason murmured, tugging nervously at his ear, "we, uh, we were just talking about Google."
The brunette's eyes flashed to his, and he knew had Johnny not been in the room she would have beat him with the stapler. He was relieved to provide a distraction to O'Brien's presence or else things could have turned extremely awkward.
"Google?" Johnny asked, glancing between the two of them as his eyes sparkled with curiosity.
"Such an asshole," she replied, slapping Jason on the shoulder as she motioned for him to scoot back from the desk.
He rolled his eyes and shook his head at Johnny, as Elizabeth dropped to her knees and crawled beneath the desk. His friend cocked his head to the side and gave him an odd look, but Jason made nothing of it. She continued to grumble under her breath and he took the opportunity to kick her gently enough in the side that it got her attention.
"Jason Morgan!" she cried, jerking her head up quickly and slamming it against the top of the desk, which eliciting a string of swear words that would have surely caused Lulu to keel over.
Johnny raised his eyebrows as he stared across at his friend, but Jason just shrugged when Elizabeth reappeared, one hand clutching her phone while the other rubbed the back of her head.
"Son of a bitch," she moaned, leaning against the edge of the desk and glaring at Jason. "That's twice now in the last couple of days."
"I see you found your phone," he murmured, nodding towards her hand.
"Yeah," she replied, glancing down at it, "but it's dead, which is your fault because you kept calling me this morning to find out where I was. I got mad and threw my phone, which of course I didn't remember until I was all the way home."
"Uh, I didn't want you high-jacking my office again," he reminded her, rolling his eyes in annoyance.
It wasn't the first time that he caught her using his computer, or his paperclips or printer paper. She got a kick out of getting a five finger discount on office supplies and always told him to write them off when he got upset, but she didn't realize he was pissed because she wasn't using them for anything office related.
She once borrowed two thousand paperclips to make some kind of chain that she attached to a canvas and splattered paint on. It wasn't her best work, but she tended to do things like that when she was upset, so he'd gotten used to it.
"Not that it's any help seeing as it's dead, but oh well," she sighed, dropping the phone into her purse as she gathered her things. "I'll just use a pay phone."
"Or you could charge it," Jason offered, shifting his eyes briefly to Johnny who was watching them intently with a serious expression on his face.
"I have to meet with the gallery owner," she said, shaking her head as if this was something he was supposed to know. "I also have to call the tailor about my dress for the opening, and I need to buy shoes, as well as other things…" She sighed, tossing her head not so slyly in Johnny's direction.
"Or not," he hissed, shaking his head at Johnny who was seemed very interested in whatever it was they were talking about.
"Whatever, Morgan," she murmured, touching O'Brien delicately on the shoulder as she passed him on her way to the door. "Enjoy your coffee beans, boys!"
Jason grunted when the door slammed behind her as he scooted back up to the desk. He grumbled under his breath, just like she had at him moments ago.
"What?" he asked, glancing up at Johnny as he rearranged a few items on his desk that he knew she had moved around that morning in hopes of pissing him off.
"Nothing," he replied, a confused grin spreading across his face. "Nothing at all."