WIP - Ladder of Success - New

A letter announcing his 30^th High School reunion coinciding with a health scare has Lochlyn MacAfee re-evaluating his life. He’s gone from a fourteen year old runaway that sold his body for food to a corporate giant that commands respect and occasionally fear. But at what price? How much has he sacrificed to climb the ladder of success?

Once off the streets, he hides his sexuality, losing a man he fell in love with along the way. An attempt to reconcile with his family ends in disaster. His employees consider him cold and unemotional—detached from the world at large. His constituents view him as ruthless, aggressive and domineering.

Has money done this to him? Or is it the lack of an emotional connection with another human being caused people to avoid him, their interaction kept to a minimum? Has his ego inflated so much that he thinks he deserves everything, when his heart wonders if he deserves anything? Will the loneliness consume him, his inability to open up a cage with which he can’t escape?

Bottom line, Lochlyn doesn’t like himself very much, but doesn’t know if he’s willing to change. What for? Then a reason walks into his life in the form of his old flame. Dane Groves has changed as well over the years. Gone is the timid, slightly submissive boy that Lochlyn loved, replaced with a confident and well adjusted man. A man who not only is not interested in anything Lochlyn might have to say, but is also has a long term boyfriend.

Lochlyn figures he lost his chance at love and happiness 30 years ago and against his nature, doesn’t pursue Dane. Used to getting what he wants, it’s a new feeling for Lochlyn to let something go like that. But Dane is a human being, not a corporation or a car or even a girlfriend that means nothing.

It was a chance meeting at the hospital that changes Lochlyn’s mind about Dane—after seeing the bruises the man is sporting. Lochlyn’s feelings for Dane are still very much alive, and to see the only man he’s ever loved in pain sets him on a course that will change his life—whether for better or worse he’s not sure. But it can’t be any more difficult than his climb up the ladder of success.