Work Text:
October
“Hi, you're through to Alex at L&G - can I start by taking your name please?”
Henry jumps, fumbling the pencil he'd been idly rolling between his fingers and almost stabbing himself in the palm with it. He hadn't been expecting to get through to someone this quickly.
“Hi, yes – Henry, calling from Rothschild. We've had an email regarding some quotes for a client and I just wanted to get some clarification. Can I give you a reference number?”
“Go ahead,” the guy drawls, sounding like he'd be more at home on a ranch than in a call centre; Henry's never been a huge fan of the Texan accent, personally, but he's oddly into this one. He probably needs a little more sleep, and maybe some kind of sex life.
He rattles off a number and the client's surname and Alex hums, then says, “That's not bringing anything up – you sure it was from us?”
Henry resists the urge to snort. Yeah, he's pretty sure; he's had roughly twelve emails from his boss asking him what's going on with this case, so he—
Henry stops and stares at the email, then briefly closes his eyes. Bollocks. He has absolutely, one hundred percent called the wrong provider.
“I'm… not sure,” he says eventually, and there's silence on the other end of the line for a moment before Alex answers, sounding amused.
“Do you want to check what email address it came from?”
“There have been quite a few – this case has been a bit of a mess,” Henry says, not entirely untruthfully. Of course, he's staring at the email right this second, and it's definitely not from L&G, but he's too ashamed to admit it; he's been at work for all of thirty minutes and he already wants to climb out the window. “Let me just check?”
“Sure thing,” Alex says easily.
Henry stares at it a bit longer and makes absentminded humming noises while he does nothing else at all, employing verbal play-acting to convince Alex that he's not an idiot, and is in fact so busy and important that his emails have become a veritable jungle of information. Nobody else needs to know that he's this much of a disaster.
“Right,” he says eventually, “I'm actually struggling to find the original email now.” Liar, liar, liar. “If there's no record on your end, I'm sure I've just made an error—”
“I can raise it with the admin team,” Alex says, and he sounds like he's on the brink of laughter now. God. This is terrible.
“I don't think that will be necessary,” Henry says with a sigh, and Alex makes a noise on the other end of the line that could be construed as a cough. Henry knows, somehow, that it was laughter; he just knows. This stranger is mocking him for his incompetence, and he deserves it.
“Well, if you need us in future, I can give you our email address?” Alex says, sounding remarkably put-together for someone who's slowly ruining Henry's life. He rattles off the email address – which only serves to confirm that Henry had indeed being speaking to entirely the wrong provider about this issue – and Henry diligently writes it down on his notepad, finishing it up with a little sad face and the word ‘urgh’ in all caps.
He's an adult, with a steady job and a first class degree, and he feels so incredibly stupid that he thinks his brain must actively be decaying.
“Thank you for your help, and apologies for wasting your time,” he says sincerely, already wondering just how long this shame spiral is going to last. He'd been intending to be so productive this morning when he'd first arrived at work; now he's going to have to put aside at least an hour to stare at nothing and eat Hula Hoops while he replays every syllable of this conversation on a loop in his head.
“Don't worry about it,” Alex says, and Henry can practically hear him shrugging. “Have a good day, Henry.”
Henry absolutely will not.
December
Henry doesn’t think it’s unreasonable for him to be mad about the lot he’s been handed, just occasionally. Sure, he has a loving family, but through his attempts to cut out the malignant parts of it from his life – namely, his grandmother – he sees them much less than he feels is right or fair. He has a degree from a good university, yes, but he’s not using it at all in the job he’s in. He’s well-paid in said job, but he has to spend most of his earnings on extortionate rent – which ties back into his attempts to remove his grandmother’s influence from his life.
Most days, it’s fine. But some days—
“I don’t even know how she got my number.”
Pez hums sympathetically from the desk opposite and spins around a couple of times in his chair. “Yes, well – the devil works hard, but your grandmother works harder.”
“She’s vile,” Henry continues, hold music still tinkling softly in his ear, “and I hope she falls down a very deep well and gets stuck at the bottom for many days. I hope that when they find her, she has had to resort to horrendous survival tactics, and feels deep shame for the rest of her natural life.”
There’s a cough in response, but it’s—
Well, it’s not from Pez. Henry closes his eyes with a sigh. “Hello?”
“Hi,” an amused voice says on the other end of the line. “You’re through to Alex at L&G. Can I start by taking your name please?”
“Henry,” he admits, although the lure of a false name is calling to him like a siren song. “I’m – look, how long were you on the line just now?”
There’s a pause before the man answers. “I’m legally obligated to advise you that these calls are recorded for training and monitoring purposes. Is that enough of an answer?”
Henry just about manages not to swear. “Thank you. Unfortunately that is very clear.”
“Great. How can I help you today, Henry?”
He wonders if they offer euthanasia. “I’m just looking to check that a policy has been put on risk please?”
“Sure – d’you have the client’s full name?”
“Lobelia Young.”
There’s a pause, then some typing, then the sound of someone clearing their throat again. “Okay, and – assuming she’s not currently at the bottom of a well – can I take the client’s current address, and the name of your company?”
Henry, whose face is probably on fire, provides the information as clearly as he can, and when it is established that the plan is indeed on risk, he attempts to disengage himself from the conversation as quickly and smoothly as possible. “Thank you,” he says.
“Don’t worry about it,” Alex says, and realisation slams into Henry like a truck going hell for leather down the M1.
“Um,” Henry says, then puts the phone down.
“Henry,” Pez says pleasantly, having stopped twirling in his chair so that he can, presumably, see his best friend’s complete breakdown in real time. “I have some questions.”
“No,” Henry says, the single syllable coming out a tad strangled. That had been the same person he’d fucked up in front of last time; the southern-US drawl that Henry had found strangely alluring, even as he’d realised – months ago now – that he’d called through to the wrong place entirely.
“Did you just—”
“No.”
“You did though,” Pez points out sunnily, even though the phone is ringing and it is one hundred percent his job to answer said phone. “You said ‘um’ and put the phone down on someone.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Henry says, even though he just did. “Ergo, following that line of logic, it cannot have happened. And if it had happened, I would be morally obligated to throw myself out of the window.”
Pez and Henry look over as one to stare at the bay window of their office.
“My mistake,” Pez concedes.
Henry, who is now more mistake than man, goes back to his list and finds the square with the words ‘Young, Lobelia’ in it, so he can colour it green. At least that’s gone right today; he can be thankful for that, he supposes. “Quite right.”
There’s a moment of silence – which is always ominous in this context – before Pez says; “But you did—”
“Yes, Pez,” Henry interrupts loudly, throwing down his pen and putting his face in his hands. “I said ‘um’ and then put the phone down on a man at Legal & General. Alex from L&G heard me talking about someone needing to fall down a well and then I panicked and realised—” He stops himself, leaving his face in his hands. No. He doesn’t want to explain that this is the second time he’s made a vocal error while on the phone to this one specific person; Pez doesn’t require context.
“You realised?”
“I realised there’s no way he’s paid enough to deal with being present for my weekly breakdown,” Henry finishes firmly, taking his head out of his hands and sighing. “God, my therapist is going to think someone’s died.”
“But not, sadly—”
“Do not say ‘your grandmother’,” Henry says flatly. “I don’t want to have to think about it, because then I shall have to have an opinion either way, and I wouldn’t care to know which side I fall on.”
“You’re so reasonable sometimes,” Pez sighs, then throws a paperclip at him across the room that somehow gets tangled in his hair.
Henry’s never been a huge fan of Tuesdays.
February
“There’s a time and place for a dick pic,” Pez says firmly, scrolling furiously through his phone as though their boss couldn’t come through at any moment and catch them talking about genitalia at work. “That time is after 10pm on a Friday, when you’re a little bit drunk and the other person has explicitly requested a picture of your trouser snake. It should be well-framed and tastefully lit, and ideally it should not be flaccid.”
“I cannot believe you’re saying these words to me,” Henry mutters as he stares with no small degree of apathy at his ‘to do’ list. “There’s a time and place for this conversation too, Pez, and it’s neither now nor here.”
“We are not only friends, but countrymen,” Pez says stoutly. “We are, in this world of thieves, liars, and ginger minstrels, a force for good. We have banded together in the face of potato-faced musicians and bland guitar riffs and risen above it all to stand tall and unashamed.”
“Is this entire speech going to be about Ed Sheeran?”
“Most of it, yes. What was I saying?”
“Something about unsolicited dick pics,” Henry reminds him, even though he’s not sure he can listen to much more of this.
“Right – all this to say, I’m not sure what about my carefully presented and curated dating profile suggests I want a metaphorical wang to the face, Hazza. I’m about ready to create a form of software that recognises when a penis picture is received, and automatically sends a questionnaire in response. The questions will range from ‘does your mother know about this?’ to ‘is that any way to behave?’”
“That’s nice,” Henry says vaguely as he realises with mounting dread that he’s going to have to call L&G again, for the first time in two months. It’s not that he thinks that he’s going to be unlucky enough to get Alex again, except that he absolutely thinks that; he’s never had the best luck in the world, and he has a sinking feeling that his trials are not over.
“I’m going to send him back a picture of a limp banana,” Pez says decisively, and Henry hums his agreement as encouragingly as possible as he picks up the receiver.
It takes forty minutes for Henry to get through to an actual human being – which is par for the course with any company who wants to try and force you to use online services for something that absolutely cannot be done via online services – and Henry spends that time writing a letter to a client who has filled in their Trust forms incorrectly three times, and who absolutely refuses to speak to Henry on the telephone about it.
“Hello, you’re through to Charles at L&G – can I take your name and the company you’re calling from please?”
Henry lets out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding and provides the necessary details. It’s not Alex! Perhaps he isn’t cursed after all, and will in fact be able to live out the rest of his life in relative peace, without the spectre of shame and embarrassment hanging over him like the sword of Damocles.
“Sorry about this,” Charles says apologetically as Henry waits for him to check the Letter of Authority on file. “I’m having – oh… Right, my system’s just crashed. Sorry about this – are you okay to hold for a moment and I’ll put you through to one of my colleagues? I don’t know how long it’s going to take to get things back up and running.”
With a deep sense of foreboding, Henry says, “Yes, of course – no problem,” even though it is what one might consider a bit of a problem, and allows himself to be put on hold.
Then—
“Hey, my colleague says he’s having some system issues, so you’re through to Alex. It’s Christian Metheringham’s case, isn’t it?”
Henry closes his eyes. “Yes.”
“Cool – Charles gave me the details of where you’re calling from, so I’ll check for the Letter of Authority on file, but I don’t think he caught your name?”
Henry wishes he were a less honest person – he really does. He wishes that, when God was handing out dishonesty like fun size Mars bars at Hallowe’en, he’d solemnly held out his bucket and requested that it be filled to the brim. Instead, what he has is one sad little satsuma’s worth of duplicity, which means he says, “My name’s Henry,” in a tone of voice that suggests – quite rightly – that he wishes it wasn’t.
There’s a pause in which Henry can practically hear the cogs turning, and when Alex speaks again, he sounds disbelieving. “Sorry if I’m wrong here, but—”
“Yes, I’m that Henry,” he admits bitterly, and Alex laughs – actually laughs – and Henry has to pretend the sound doesn’t make him feel things, even as his stomach swoops like a low-flying bird of prey. “Please don’t hold it against me.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Alex says, a smile in his voice. Henry wonders what that must look like; what he must look like. Then he stops, because that way madness lies, and he’s not so touch-starved and lonely that he’s going to start romanticising the disembodied voice of a call centre worker. Alex’s job must be stressful enough. “Okay, I’ve found the Letter of Authority – just need to clear security—”
Henry, who is no stranger to these kinds of calls, manages this part on autopilot. There’s only so many times someone can ask you for a date of birth, first line of address and postcode before you know to bring those things up on your system before they’re even requested.
“Great – what’s the query in relation to?”
“Mr Metheringham’s penis fund,” Henry says, then shuts his mouth so abruptly that he almost bites through his tongue. Pez is staring at him from the other side of the room with a look so blank that he – much like Charles’ computer system – might actually have crashed.
Penis fund. Henry is going to step into oncoming traffic.
“Mr Metheringham’s—”
“Pension fund,” Henry says loudly, before Alex can finish the sentence. “It’s – it’s about the client’s pension fund. With L&G.”
“Okay,” Alex says, sounding like he would very much like to be laughing right now. “That’s – okay. Can I take the plan number?”
Henry gives him the plan number, hoping he doesn’t sound as hollow and mournful as he feels, and eventually gets to the point of the call – and therefore that little bit closer to it being over, so that he can slide out of his chair and hide beneath his desk for a bit. “I just need to know if there’s a Guaranteed Annuity Rates table available, or if the GAR is only available at the plan Selected Retirement Age,” he says, like any of this matters anymore.
“It’s a Guaranteed Annuity Plan, rather than having a rate applied,” Alex says immediately. “So it gets recalculated twice a year, but the rate is implicit. Recalculation usually happens in April and November.”
This is exactly what Henry had told the adviser who asked him to check on this, but he’d been asked to document it anyway. Which means he now needs to do a file note detailing information he already had, having spent an unreasonable amount of time on hold before being embarrassed beyond anything he’s ever experienced in his life.
It’s a fucking Tuesday again.
“Thank you,” he says politely. “Can I take your surname for the call record please?”
“Claremont-Diaz,” Alex says immediately. “You need me to spell that for you?”
“I think I have it,” Henry says, heart thumping in his chest at the deeply forbidden thought that Alex has now become Google-able. “Thank you for your help, Alex.”
“Don’t mention it. Have a good day, Henry.”
“You too,” Henry says, which he absolutely means, even though Alex is about to hang up on him and no doubt laugh for a solid ten minutes at his slip-up. He’s not sure why, but he can’t stop himself from adding, “I’m sure we’ll speak again soon.”
It’s probably his imagination, but Henry thinks Alex sounds rather soft when he responds. “Kinda seems likely at this stage. Take care of yourself.”
Henry puts the phone down and thinks that, regrettably, he might have a crush.
Pez takes a deep breath. “You said—”
“And whose fault is that, hm?”
March
The phrase ‘continuous professional development’ is the bane of Henry’s existence. Unfortunately, he is still beholden to it in order to keep the silly little letters at the end of his name, so he ends up on a Pensions Flexibility refresher course the week after his birthday with one of his colleagues. Marianne is forty-six years old, always smells of baked goods, and refers to UFPLS* as ‘oompa loompas’. Henry likes her, but the only thing they have in common is that they like men.
Although, to be fair, that’s usually enough.
“Is it just me,” Marianne says in an undertone, the rings on her fingers clinking merrily against her tea cup, “or do these things get worse every year?”
She is not, Henry knows, talking about the course material. “It’s not a total loss,” he muses, looking around at the assembled support specialists and trainee advisers. “Although we did peak in 2018 with Gerald.”
Gerald had been six-foot-two, leanly muscled, and inappropriately named, and while he had been wearing an immaculately tailored suit for the entirety of the course, Marianne and Henry had both wished fervently that it would spontaneously combust. Sadly, he had also been wearing a wedding ring, but Marianne’s motto is that ‘looking isn’t illegal, and neither is what I think about that man’s thighs in the privacy of my own mind’.
Today, opportunities to objectify strangers over their cups of tea are thin on the ground, until—
“Lord have mercy,” Marianne breathes as someone enters the back of the room, only just on time for the start of the course as he slides into a seat with an apologetic look on his face.
“A bit young for you,” Henry murmurs, which has Marianne stealing the last custard cream from the plate of biscuits on their table before he can take it. He probably deserved that, but given that what he’d actually wanted to say was “hands off,” he’s quite proud of his restraint.
“Now we’re all here,” the course facilitator, Dominic Fairfax, says pointedly, getting to his feet, “we can get started. I understand we’ve got quite a mix of backgrounds here today—”
The newcomer looks appropriately chagrined, but as far as Henry’s concerned, this man can do whatever he wants forever. His hair is a barely-tamed mass of dark curls, his arms well-defined even through the fabric of his shirt where he’s taken off his jacket; he looks comfortable enough in spite of the lateness of his arrival, and there are several things Henry would like to do with the soft, plush swell of his lower lip that aren’t appropriate for where they are in the slightest. He is, in short, absolutely gorgeous.
“You’re drooling,” Marianne mutters, and Henry turns resolutely back to Dominic, rolling his eyes. At least the guy is Henry’s age.
He does try his best to engage with the course from that point onwards, writing the occasional note when he thinks having supplementary information might be useful – he knows they’ll all get emailed the slides after this anyway, however, so he can still allow himself a degree of laziness. He’s been in this industry for long enough that none of this is especially new to him.
Just before the first break of the day, they’re allowed to ask questions. There are the usual ones from newbies who haven’t been doing this for long, and some slightly more complex queries from the older professionals who don’t like change, and then—
“Yep – question?” Dominic is indicating the beautiful latecomer, who has raised his hand, which means that Henry is now perving on his hands too. This can’t be healthy. It’s possible he needs to download one of those dating apps Pez has been trying to install on his phone for weeks now.
“Yeah – Alex, Legal & General. Remind me where the industry stands on pension flexibility rules when it comes to legacy plans?”
No.
Absolutely not.
No.
Henry doesn’t hear the answer to the question Alex asked, because Alex has a Texan accent and he works for L&G and there is no way on God’s green earth that this could possibly be happening, except for how it absolutely is.
“Henry,” Marianne says loudly, and he snaps out of what he has to assume was a deep trance-like state.
“Hm?” he says vaguely, and Marianne indicates the room at large, where everyone has migrated to the table of hot drinks and biscuits for their first break. “Oh. Right, sorry – I was… somewhere else entirely for a moment there.” Possibly Hell itself, but that’s by the by; it’s his own fault he was sent there, after all.
“Are you alright?” she asks curiously as they get to their feet, Henry’s eyes immediately finding Alex among the assembled support staff hanging around the Hobnobs.
“I shall let you know when I’ve figured that out,” he says with a sigh, then braces himself and heads in the general direction of tea. Apparently he’s not keeping enough of an eye on where he’s going, however, because he’s still several feet away from caffeinated relief when he walks into someone, almost spilling their drink in the process.
“Shit—”
“Oh, God, I’m so sorry—”
“No, I’m… Oh.” The voice – horribly familiar to Henry’s ears now – trails off, and Henry is forced to look up from where he’s straightening his tie to look at Alex, who is holding a coffee and a Viennese whirl and looking a little shocked.
“Hello,” Henry says, because it seems like the thing to do. “Sorry about that – wasn’t looking where I was going. I haven’t had my usual twelve cups of tea yet, which explains it.” He’s talking too much, he knows, but he can’t help himself. “I’ll get out of your—”
“Henry,” Alex says, and Henry’s stomach sinks to his knees at the absolute conviction he hears in Alex’s voice.
He sighs. “Unfortunately, yes.”
“‘Woman in the bottom of a well’ Henry,” Alex clarifies, looking a lot more amused than shocked now that he’s correctly identified the man in front of him.
Henry sighs more deeply this time, and wonders if it’s possible to sigh so much that your lungs stage some sort of intervention. He’s well-placed to find out. “That’s me. To be absolutely clear, I was talking about my bigoted grandmother, whose hobbies are lobbying for the re-legalisation of fox hunting and asking to speak to the manager of every minimum wage worker on this island. Nobody but my friend and co-worker, Pez, was meant to hear that.”
“But I heard it,” Alex confirms, grinning now. God, he’s so beautiful Henry wants to cry; he could not possibly have predicted this. “I guess there are worse ways to be remembered, right? For example—”
“Please, for the love of God, do not reference my last call,” Henry says immediately. “I beg of you. I will do anything.”
Alex appears to consider this for a moment. “D’you have a second?”
Henry frowns. “Well, we have a fifteen minute break, so I have several. Why?”
Alex raises the hand holding his biscuit in a ‘wait’ gesture, and quickly darts back to the place he’d been sitting before the break, carefully putting down his coffee and the Viennese whirl on a napkin on the table before returning to Henry’s side. “Come with me, I wanna show you something.”
“Alright,” Henry says dubiously, before following Alex out of the meeting room with a mildly concerned look back at the assembled strangers and Marianne – the latter of whom is watching him go with a smirk on her face that is completely unwarranted. Alex probably just wants to have a conversation with Henry about appropriate telephone conduct.
Alex does not want to have a conversation with him about appropriate telephone conduct.
“It was something in your voice,” Alex says a little desperately, pushing his hands up Henry’s shirt where it’s come untucked from his trousers and digging his fingernails in a little. “I knew you’d be hot.”
“Have you seen yourself?” Henry asks a little deliriously, before leaning down to kiss Alex again, effectively shutting both of them up.
Henry’s not sure how long they’ve been gone – or even if they have anything left of their break – but he’s not inclined to stop now. Not while Alex is moaning against his mouth and touching him with hot, heady reverence, and saying things like—
“This isn’t what I was expecting to see at all.”
Well, that’s actually… not Alex. Henry pulls back from the kiss so hard that his head briefly hits the wall with a dull thud, and looks over at where Marianne is holding a cup of tea and wearing a smirk that she usually saves for when someone higher up has done something wrong. Thankfully, they are on the same level at work and Henry has done nothing wrong at all, but it still strikes fear into his heart.
“I am unwell,” Henry says firmly, his hands still on Alex’s hips. If he moves away, Marianne’s going to get an eyeful, and he’s not entirely sure she’d be averse. “I have stepped out for my health. Please send my apologies to Mr Fairfax.”
“I’m also unwell,” Alex drawls, like his hands aren’t inside Henry’s shirt right now. “Sorry about that.”
Marianne considers this for a moment before shrugging and shooting Henry a look. “This is 2018 all over again.”
“He’s not married,” Henry says automatically, then frowns and looks at Alex. “Are you?”
“No – did you fuck around with a married guy at one of these things or something?”
“God no, it’s just that we like to rate attractive men at these courses to make it less dire, and Gerald—”
“I’m going now,” Marianne interrupts, waving her free hand at them and raising what looks like a brief toast to them with her tea. “Henry, I’ll see you back at the office. You’re on tea duty for a week.”
“Very reasonable,” he agrees, and then she’s gone, leaving them alone in the corridor with Henry’s shirt untucked and Alex’s warm hands resting on Henry’s even warmer skin.
“Since we’re both unwell,” Alex says slowly, pulling his hands away and clearing his throat. “D’you wanna get out of here? Seems kinda dumb for us to hang out in this hallway when I got a hotel room ten minutes away for this course.”
Henry can’t agree quickly enough.
“Kind of a crazy coincidence that you kept getting put through to me, huh?” Alex continues with a grin as he pulls Henry out into the car park. It’s a cold day but the sun is shining, and Alex looks stunning where the light’s filtering through the leaves above, reds and oranges catching on his skin and hair like he’s lit up from the inside.
“Yes,” he says softly, letting himself be pulled wherever Alex wants to go. “Mind-boggling, honestly.”
He thinks about all the things that brought him here, and wonders if ‘coincidence’ is really something he can blame for this.
Or thank.