If I’m Honest
by Corrupting Power
Chapter Eleven — BOSS FIGHT
It was strange, but Harvey got light on conversation right after that, as if he was working on something big on my behalf, which was fine, because he wasn’t the only one who was busy, and having a break on what had been my whirlwind love life suited me just fine.
As Larry had predicted about a year ago, I’d finally decided it was time to make a break from Alexandria Investments, the company that had bought up my time so long ago. All my stock options had matured, and contract negotiations were starting to come up, the very thought of which had been sending me into dread.
I was done with call centers. I’d mastered the business better than anyone, but the industry was changing, and automated service systems were the new hotness, one that I didn’t have as good a handle on as I probably should have. People weren’t calling so much as they were interacting with tier one chat bots designed to screen through the people who hadn’t done the basic troubleshooting, or didn’t follow the simple instructions they needed for whatever it was they were trying to do.
Would it have been that hard for me to pivot and pick up the new trends, figure out how to stay ahead of the curve? Not at all. But my team was already doing that for me, and the idea of having to learn it all myself seemed mindlessly tedious. I was at the top of my game now, which meant it was time for me to leave.
Quit while you’re ahead is a tough lesson to take to heart, but I decided I was gonna.
It also didn’t hurt that when I looked into what my golden parachute looked like these days, in addition to all my options, I was landing on my feet in a way I couldn’t have possibly imagined. Like, really couldn’t have possibly imagined. When John and I had left Oracle to start something up on our own, within just a few weeks of that we were approached by Alexandria Investments. I’d been happy back then because I thought my shares in AI might eventually be worth a couple mil if things went incredibly well.
Good lord, I really should’ve stopped and looked at the ground as it went whizzing beneath us sometime along the way.
We’d been hurtling forward at a thousand miles a minute the entire time.
When I’d sat down to actually look at how much AI stock was worth, and what my exit options were, I realized that somewhere along the way, I’d gone from a guy who’d been lucky to be able to buy himself a house five years ago to a guy who was now worth just barely nine figures. Back when I’d bought the house, I’d barely been tickling seven, and those were on my best days.
Why the hell had I been penny pinching so much for the last few years when I’d been sitting on this much money, you may rightfully ask? I shit you not—I’d just never looked at the stock since I bought the house. I’d decided early on when we’d joined AI that looking at it was only going to be another stress point in my life that I didn’t want to worry about, so I tucked it back in the furthest corner of my brain and didn’t worry about it, because why would I? I didn’t hate going to work each and every day, I got to call the shots and I (mostly) liked the people I worked with. That was more than enough.
Larry was surprisingly cool about me leaving the company. I strolled up to his office on a Thursday morning and asked his secretary to let me know when he had a few minutes. I’d expected Larry to freak out, to panic that I was going to bury his call center division with some new venture, but I put him at ease when I told him I was out of that business for good, and I didn’t know what my next step was going to be, but it was time for a career change. I needed a new frontier to tame.
“Only two things I’m going ask of you, good buddy,” Larry said to me over a glass of truly decadent scotch. “The first is just to sign a two-year non-compete contract. Shouldn’t be a big deal, since you said you’re out of the business, so if you’re just blowing smoke up my ass, here’s your chance to be a man about it and own up to that.”
I laughed at him, rolling my eyes. “Make it five years if you want, Larry, as long as it’s specifically relating to just call centers, and I’ll still sign it. I’m not kidding—I want something very different for whatever I end up doing next, and staying in my comfort zone is only going to drive me nuts, so you’re actually doing me a favor by making sure I can’t fall back on it. Have the contract drafted up, and I’ll sign it, any time between now and my last day, two weeks from tomorrow.”
Larry grinned, raising his glass in salute. “My man. The other thing I’m gonna ask is simply that you do me a favor and not let me fuck up your legacy, what with all the blood, sweat and tears you put into your division. You’ve got two division heads down there, Zack and Jen, and both seem like they’re doing killer work, but you’d know way better than I would. Who’s the heir to the throne?”
“You need a decision right now, or can I tell you on Monday?”
He swiped his hand dismissively through the air, as if to make sure I wasn’t worrying about it. “Take the weekend and tell me on Monday. You’ve probably been thinking about this for a long time, so I’m sure you already know and just want to make sure you get it right.”
“Actually Larry, I just decided to get out a few days ago.”
“Nothing I did, I hope?” Larry laughed. “I’d hate for it to get out that I was scaring off the talent, especially since I fired your buddy John last year. Oh shit! This isn’t about that, is it? I distinctly remember you telling me at the time that you were cool with it! I believed you when you said you were cool with it, so it’s uncool if you uncool with it and didn’t tell me, man!”
I laughed hard at that, having to set down the glass on top of his desk, I was practically crying. “You have such a shit memory, Larry! Remember, John’s wife used to be my girlfriend, and she was cheating on me with him basically right when we joined the company. I told you all of this back then, and that I didn’t give a shit if you fired him! And I still don’t!”
Larry smirked, tilting his head to one side. “Soon-to-be ex—wife, if the gossip’s to be believed,” he told me. “John sort of crashed and burned when I let him go, or whatever. I think she expected him to just land on his feet somewhere else immediately, but last I looked, he’s still ‘consulting’ on his LinkedIn page, and I guess that losing her preferred lifestyle is a bit of a deal breaker for her. Maybe she’s not advertising it yet, but I’m certain I saw her and Josef having dinner together the other night, and they were starting to look cozy. You think there’s a chance there?”
“Well,” I told him, “she also cheated on me with Josef, right when we started here. She was banging both of them behind my back, and when I eventually found out, shit got messy and I got the fuck out of there. I always assumed John had just won out. But maybe Josef’s deciding to give her another shot. I mean, say what you will about Vanessa, the woman’s one hell of a charmer.”
“She’d have to be to juggle three of the smartest guys I know without one of them catching on sooner? How long did it go on?”
“Probably longer than I want to think about,” I said, finishing off the scotch. “I know she was already banging Josef when we showed up at AI. He told me later, but I should’ve been suspicious at the time because she was the one who recommended the company to us as a good home for our skillset. It wasn’t really her field, so the fact that she had a path lined up for us never sat well with me, but I tried not to think about it. I mean, it turned out you and John had sort of been college buddies, and John didn’t even think about that until we were in the fucking room pitching you on the idea, so that should tell you what a dimwit he could be on his best days. Vanessa and John didn’t start hooking up until we’d been with AI for at least a few months, at which point I guess Josef was mostly out of the picture, but I’m not sure how long he sort of lingered around on the peripheral. It was a few more months before I caught on.”
“How’d you find out?”
“You remember that company retreat up in Vail you had, maybe six or seven months after we’d set up the Call Team Strike division?” I asked him. Larry had come up with the name, saying he wanted us to sound like a military unit or something. I’d suggested ‘Call Team Six’ but he’d said the reference wasn’t obvious enough. I didn’t care, so I didn’t fight the alternate name. What’s in a name, right?
“Great party!” Larry said. “I mean, we made some smart business deals while we were there with some other companies that also not-so-coincidentally were also on retreats nearby. You seemed like you were in good spirits the whole time!”
“Yeah, hate to tell you this, Larry, but you should never play poker with anybody. I was fucking miserable most of that trip, because we went out to dinner the first night, and Vanessa said she wasn’t feeling good so John offered to take her back to the hotel, since you needed me to explain the business to the folks over at Apple.”
“And?”
“Aaand after we finished meeting with Apple, when we headed back to the hotel, I decided I was going to go and chill in the hot tub before heading back to the room, since I didn’t want to wake Vanessa, but lo and behold, when I headed into the pool room with the hot tub, there were John and Vanessa, en flagrante delicto.”
“They were having a deli sandwich?” Larry asked, genuine confusion on his face.
“They were fucking, Larry,” I sighed. “In the hot tub. Just daring to get caught. They were so caught up in each other that they didn’t even notice me in the doorway. So instead of going for a swim, I headed back to my room, took all of Vanessa’s things out of it and dumped them just outside of John’s room, then headed down to the front desk and had the room key changed. Thankfully they had those little magnetic keycard locks, so it didn’t even take a minute. I called back home and had my friend go into my apartment and pack up all of my shit. I wanted to fly back here immediately and do it myself, but we still had loads of shit to do in Vail, so my buddy handled all of it for me. I had him load everything that even vaguely looked like mine into a truck and move it into a storage unit across town.”
“Jesus, you are fucking cold as ice, Deke.”
“So when her key to the room doesn’t work, she goes over to talk to John about it, but he’s already coming to see her to tell her that all of her shit was on his doorstep. I sort of expected her to have some sort of meltdown, demanding that I open the door and that we talk it out or something, but instead she just moved into John’s room with him, and we’ve barely spoken more than a handful of words since. I moved my flight back up a few hours so I wouldn’t be on the same plane as them. When I got back from Vail, I moved all my stuff into a new apartment and had my name taken off the lease of the old one, severing the last few ties I had with her. About a year later, I cashed out a few of my stocks and bought a house, got a dog and moved on with my life. Never looked back.”
“And John ended up marrying Victoria—”
“Fucking hell, Larry, Vanessa. I’ve told you her name is Vanessa like a dozen times in this conversation alone. Shit, you were at their wedding.”
“I probably was, yeah, but I was blasted to the gills on coke, and I don’t remember a thing,” Larry laughed. “Other than I remember hitting on a bridesmaid who slapped me hard. Other than that, whole fucking day’s a complete blank. Did they invite you to it?”
I laughed, rolling my eyes. “Of course they did, because they wanted to fucking rub my nose in it, as if to show me that the reason she was cheating on me was because of something I’d done. I didn’t go, of course. John and I had to be coworkers here at AI, but I resolved to just keep the business relationship professional and icy, sticking entirely to the job at hand. You’d moved John into the center stalk by that point, and out of my hair, so I didn’t really give a shit. It was around the time of their wedding that Josef confessed to me that Vanessa had been cheating on me with him before we joined AI, though he hadn’t realized it, because she’d told him that her and I were in an ‘open relationship,’ so it meant that he could bang her with impunity. He told me he thought I’d dodged a bullet, because she was the most mercenary woman he’d ever met, with loyalty to nobody and nothing, and the only reason she got away with it was because she was as hot as she was. I didn’t really ask him to elaborate on the timeline, because at that point I was two years free and clear of her, so what did any of it really matter, in the long run?”
“Josef’s still with the company, Deke,” Larry said. “Should I be worried about him?”
“Nah, me and Josef are all good,” I told him. “I don’t know for a fact that he didn’t think it was cheating, but it certainly strikes me as the kind of thing Vanessa would’ve told him to get what she wanted. Back in the early days, when we were still at Oracle, we were swamped and working long hours, something I repeatedly told Vanessa to tell me if it bothered her, but she never said a word. Josef also told me that Vanessa had said the same thing about John, that they had an open relationship, but by then Josef had heard about the incident in Vail, and told her she wasn’t going to get any affection from him unless she was free and clear of any other emotional attachments. Then her and John got married and I assumed it was all dead and buried. Josef probably did too.”
“Maybe Josef thinks that since Vanessa and John are getting divorced, it’s game on.”
“Hell, you’d think he’d know better by now. What makes you think they’re getting divorced anyway?”
Larry shrugged. “While John lost most of his stock options when I fired his ass for cause, since he was trying to get me ousted from the fucking company I started, he’d already bought a decent amount of stock before then, which he’s legally entitled to hold onto, much as it pains me. Anyway, a lawyer came to me asking how much I’d be willing to pay for bundle of stock suspiciously around half the size of what John walked away with. I’ve been through enough divorces to recognize someone sniffing around for a whiff of what assets are worth. Mrs. Ma’s the first and second made sure that when I married Lynn, Mrs. Ma the third and final, I had the sort of ironclad prenup agreement that if she ever left me or cheated on me, she wouldn’t get a fucking dime. Shit, she’d actually owe me money, because she’d also be liable for all legal fees, both her team’s and mine. But me and Lynn, we get along like pastrami and rye, so it’s all hunky dory. So yeah, I’d say she’s jumping ship.”
“Fuck, I should remind Josef what he told me on my way out,” I said, shaking my head. “The frog and the scorpion all over again.”
“The what and the what now?”
I waved a hand in his direction. “Don’t worry about it, Larry,” I told him, standing up, starting to head towards the door. “Anyway, I’ll have a name for a successor for you on Monday.”
“Oh, I never did get a chance to ask you, how’d you like the Bulgotti?”
I stopped at the door, shaking my head with a soft laugh, looking down at my feet before turning back to look at him. “Can I offer you a piece of advice, Larry?”
“Hey, my dude, I’m always open ears, you know that!” he said, a giant smile on his face as he was refilling his glass with more scotch.
“Learn what you’re talking about before you start talking about it,” I said. “People are afraid of you and your money, so nobody wants to correct you, but I don’t work for you any more, so I guess I’m above reproach at this point. The painting behind your desk is a Warhol, by one of the leading figures of the pop art movement. He’s not just ‘the soup can guy.’”
“Okay, but what’s that got to do with the Bulgotti?”
I chuckled, rubbing the bridge of my nose for a second. “There’s no such thing as a Bulgotti, Larry. The motorcycle you have here in the office is a Ducati. The tasty Korean BBQ beef you have catered in a couple of times a month is Bulgogi. The car you gave me is a Bugatti, and while it’s a dream to drive, it’s also the single most expensive thing I’ve ever owned, and that includes my house. I’m probably going to sell it off, because while it’s a joy to drive, the insurance is high enough to make even a banker blush. But it’s a Bugatti, not a Bulgotti.”
Larry looked absolutely dumbstruck, and I figured, why not just let it all out.
“While I’m at it...” I continued. “Fish eggs are called caviar, not clavier—that’s a musical instrument. And when you told me that you named the company Alexandria Indexes after the town where the Greek oracle was, that’s Delphi. Alexandria is where the world’s largest library once was, and the Lighthouse of Alexandria was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, so maybe the next time you decide you want to talk to someone about the history of the company, if you want to look like you know what you’re talking about, maybe pick one of those two instead.”
He looked angry, but not at me, which was funny to see. It was almost like the playboy filter had been yanked out from his eyes and now he was seeing the world a bit more clearly, for the first time in a long time. “Why the fuck has nobody told me any of this before?”
“I’m almost positive your secretary Ashley has, a bunch of times, and you’ve just either dismissed her out of hand or talked over her,” I said to him from the door, not yet opening it. “You should listen to her more, a lot more. You’d have seen John’s failed coup d’etat months earlier if you had. In fact, if you want a free piece of business advice, since you fired John a year ago, you’ve had a revolving door on that position, with three different VPs in ten months. Figure out a way to fire that dumbass Hunter you’ve got in there and give the job to Ashley instead. You’re wasting her talents keeping her as a secretary. Anyway, I’ll see you on Monday, Larry.”
I didn’t give him a chance to answer as I just headed out of the room, finally, for once in my life, getting the last word on the garrulous Larry Ma.
From there, I went down to my floor to talk to Zack and Jen one-on-one. I sort of knew who I was going to leave in charge before I did that, but I wanted to be certain about it. I talked to Zack first, and while he was enthusiastic and happy for me, he was very focused on what was going to happen with the Call Team Strike division—were they going to get new management, were they going to be reduced in headcount because of my departure, were they going to be expanded, who would be in charge, when would they know what the new org structure looked like, etc.
Jen, by contrast, wanted to know how I was feeling about all of it. CTS had been my life’s work for most of the last decade, and she wanted to be sure that hanging it all up was my decision, and that I wasn’t being forced out or anything. After I assured her that the decision was mine, and that Larry would’ve probably tried to talk me out of it if he’d thought he could have, she asked about what was next for me, and what I was going to do with myself when I wasn’t flying all over the place setting up call centers and walking people through flow charts.
At the end of the conversation, I told Jen that I was going to recommend she be put in charge of CTS, naming her as my heir to the throne. She told me that she was extremely surprised by that, considering how focused Zack was on the bottom line all the time. That, I told her, was why I was choosing her instead. Zack had a great head for the business details, but he was shit with people, always thinking of his needs first and his people second, despite me constantly trying to drill work/life balance into him over and over in the three years since he’d been on the team.
Despite the fact that Jen was a scrapper and had sort of a rambunctious attitude, she’d also been the glue that had been holding the team together. The boisterous appearance concealed a very attentive heart that prioritized the well-being of her team members over any silly goals or milestones. It had been my very first lesson to her, and the one I’d told her would be the most important she’d ever learn, and she’d not only learned it, she’d incorporated it into every fiber of her being.
“If it were me, Jen, once you’re in charge of the team, elevate Zack and put him in charge of the processes, and hire a replacement for you to handle the people, and more clearly mark out the difference between those two territories,” I told her. “I’ve tried to get Zack to think more about the people he’s working with as people but he’s so focused on the bottom line that he’s just kinda crap at the fuzzier aspects of all of this. Maybe have Zack working on the bots and automation processes, since those are going to become a bigger part of what the team does moving forward, so he feels like he’s still getting some progress out of the deal, but I can’t imagine a better person in charge of the whole division than you. You’ve earned it. I’ll tell Larry on Monday, and they’ll get started on the paperwork for it.”
I stood up and held out my hand for her to shake, but she stood up and wrapped her arms around me in a big old squeezy hug, clenching onto me firmly. “I’m gonna miss the fuck outta you, boss,” she said to me, tears in her eyes. “You promise me I’m not going to be playing against you soon?”
“Signing a non-compete clause even,” I told her, ruffling her hair. “Gonna do something entirely different with my life.”
“I can’t believe you really don’t have a plan for what comes next, boss,” she laughed, pulling back, lifting her hand up to wipe her eyes, her makeup running a little. “You’ve always had a plan for everything ever.” Nobody, apparently, had seen this coming, except for Larry. Maybe he wasn’t quite as dense as I thought he was. Or maybe he just wasn’t dense when it came to business.
The next few weeks sort of flew by, and while I didn’t think about the bracelet much, I do remember thinking on my last day at Alexandria, when the company threw me a giant going away party, that it was odd I hadn’t felt any pressure from Harvey during that stretch of time. Granted, I had spent most of the two weeks buried beneath a literal mountain of paperwork—Larry had taken me at my word, and made my $12 mil golden parachute dependent on me honoring a five-year non-compete clause, and he seemed pleased that I didn’t even hesitate before signing it. After I read it carefully first, naturally, because while I may like Larry, that didn’t mean I entirely trusted him.
The separation contract required one minor change, which we both initialed and agreed on. Apparently former employees were barred from ever setting foot on company property again, as a sort of security failsafe, but both Larry and Jen (who was indeed being installed as my replacement) wanted me to occasionally come by and consult just a little bit during a transitional period, checking in to make sure nothing was blowing up after I left it. I couldn’t do that if I wasn’t allowed to set foot on the grounds, not well anyway. And Larry told me it would be nice to see my smiling face once or twice a season for the next year or so.
At my going away party, Larry also made a handful of announcements, offically naming Jen as my replacement (even though the word had basically gotten around to nearly everyone by that point) but also announcing that his former secretary Ashley would be the new VP in charge of personnel development and management, the position I’d recommended he put her when I’d told him I was leaving. And he also announced that he’d given her a brand new Ducati as a gift to welcome her to her new position.
He got the name of the motorcycle right and everything.
I’d driven the Bugatti in to work, and so I’d been very careful not to drink much at the party. One of Larry’s going away presents, however, had been an entire case of whiskey, something I assured him was completely unnecessary, but Larry was always over the top with his gifts and would not be talked out of it. It was loaded into the passenger seat, because it was too big to fit in the Chiron’s measly trunk. I put the seatbelt around it, though, just to keep it safe.
The party was still going even after I left, but since I was done with the company, I decided I wanted to beat rush hour, and left as early as I could without anyone getting worked up about it, and headed back to my house, where to my surprise there was a car waiting out front.
When I pulled the Bugatti into the garage, I could see two men getting out of the car, walking towards me, so I didn’t bother closing the garage door, heading over towards them as they wandered up my driveway. “Can I help you?”
“Are you Mister King? Mister Derrick King?”
I chuckled, nodding. “You here to serve me a subpoena or something?”
“Ha. Ha ha. No, Mister King, no subpoenas,” the taller man said to him. They were both rather nondescript older white guys, silver hair and ridiculously expensive suits. One of them had a briefcase with him. “We wanted to talk to you about your property. We’ve been trying to reach you for about a month now, but it’s always seemed you’ve been out and about whenever we’ve come by to get in contact with you.”
“I’m Peterson, he’s Morales. We’re here to talk to you about your home. We’d like to make an offer to buy it.”
“Like you’ve bought the rest of the houses on the block?” I said to them. “C’mon in. Let’s have a conversation about this, and see what we can work out.”
“That’s quite a car that you have, Mr. King,” Morales said to me. “Did you recently come into significant money?”
“The car was a gift from my boss, well, ex-boss, about a year ago, but I think I’m going to end up selling it,” I said. “The insurance is insane. Not worth the hassle. It’s a hell of a ride to drive, though, so it’ll be tough parting with it. Still, people gawk and I’m terrified of parking it anywhere... more trouble than it’s worth, you ask me.”
We headed into the house and I moved to let Astro in from the back yard, as he bounded inside, happy as always to see me, but giving slight growls to the two men in suits, who were cautiously sitting down at my kitchen table.
“Easy, boy,” I told him. “If I need you to bite, I’ll tell you.”
Astro gave a quiet satisfied woof and then moved over to his bowl, eager to eat, as I poured his food into it.
“So I’m sure you’ve heard Mister King, but we’ve been buying up all the houses on this block, with plans to convert the entire lot into an eight floor condominium building, something that will suit the needs of the neighborhood much better than all this... wasted land is currently doing,” Peterson said to me. “Lawns and yards—it’s all so 1950s and so very wasteful. So our plan is to turn the block into a much more efficient use of space. Oh, we will still put a public park on the top of it, so that we’re working to offset our carbon footprint and helping beautify the neighborhood.”
“Sounds like you have quite the plan,” I told them, picking up Astro’s mostly empty water dish, running it under the sink to fill it up. “And just one little problem standing in the way... me.”
“Come now, Mister King. You’ve only owned this house for five years, and you’ve done no real major modifications since buying it. This was never going to be a forever home for you; it’s a way station on the way to something bigger and better and more interesting. Why, just selling your car alone would likely net you enough money to purchase a house three or four times the size of this one, not including what we’re offering you.”
I chuckled softly, rubbing my Husky’s back a bit while he snarfed down his dinner. “And here comes the offer. Cash in hand, I’m guessing, just like you were the neighbors?”
“Naturally, Mister King. One point three million dollars in cash, significantly more than we offered your neighbors, many of whom had much longer and deeper emotional connections to their homes. You were supposed to be made an offer on the same day as everyone else, but you weren’t at home, despite the fact that your schedule indicated you should’ve been.”
“My schedule is much less reliable than my nine-to-five neighbors, or at least it used to be,” I said. “I just recently parted ways with my previous employer. My choice, not theirs.”
“You see, Mister King? You don’t need to be here anymore anyway,” Peterson said to me. They both came across as slimy, but I’d also done my homework into their group. To say I’d been expecting them would be an understatement. Since Madison had told me about them a couple of weeks ago, I’d deliberately kept my schedule hard to predict, coming and going at odd hours, while doing some research into who these two guys were. I still didn’t fully understand why an old white guy had a Hispanic last name like Morales, but other than that, I knew plenty about the two of them.
Despite their approach, they weren’t horrible people. They were just impatient. They were real estate developers used to getting what they wanted and encountering not much in the way of resistance. The plans for the building they wanted to construct were already on their way to get in front of the city planning commission. They were just mostly waiting on owning my house, and the land it was on. Since I’d bought the house outright, something pretty uncommon, they weren’t able to try and buy the property out from under me via the bank, something they’d done before hand, although when they had, they’d always paid the current residents very well. It was mostly just how they did business that tended to irk people, with no regards for the neighborhood or the emotional turmoil they could cause to displaced people. They generally (and, sadly, almost always rightly) assumed they would be able to throw enough money at the problem to ease the suffering to everyone’s eventual satisfaction.
Short term solutions at the expense of making longer term problems.
That’s why I was a bit of a problem for them. If I wanted to, I could simply refuse to sell, and they would either have to build around me, which would greatly limit what they’d be able to do and would require months of redesign and work, or they would have to abandon their plans, something that it seemed like these two never did.
More than anything, they hated to lose.
“You two are legit frightened I’m going to tell you to go fuck yourselves, aren’t you?” I chuckled. “I mean, I get it. You’re kind of up Shits Creek if I do. Except that you’ve been looking into me while you’ve been trying to get in contact with me, just like I’ve been looking into you. You know, for example, exactly who I am and what company I just left, and how much money I walked away with, so if I say no, you won’t really have much recourse. If I want it to not be about the money, I can make it not be about the money. But that’s not what you’re really scared of, is it? You guys like to gamble, doing all of this in cash so you can move the money quickly, and because, well, you two get a rush off of it. But it’s a risk each and every time you do it, because if you don’t get all of the land, your gamble backfires, and you’re stuck trying to resell houses in a neighborhood you just forcibly emptied, that now looks desolate and vacant. It smells like something’s wrong, even if nothing is.”
“Are we arriving at a point any time soon, Mister King?” Morales asked me, concern dominating his face.
“Don’t get your Underoos in a twist, boys,” I laughed, walking out of the room for a moment and down the hall to my study, where I picked up a small stack of papers I’d been working on for the last week, before walking back down. “I’m going to sell you the house for your mil three offer. After you read and sign this,” I said, tossing the papers down in front of them.
“What is this?”
“It’s a few terms and conditions about what you’re going to do with the building you’re making, things that’ll ensure you don’t destroy this nice neighborhood you’re setting up shop in. It’s a contract,” I said, “and it’s been witnessed and notarized, my draft anyway. You want to make changes to it, we’ll have to go through all that again, although it won’t be too hard. Mrs. Desmond, one of the people whose houses you bought three weeks ago, doesn’t move out until tomorrow, and I can get her to do it again. Go on, take a look, read through it.”
“This is extremely unorthodox, Mister King,” Peterson said, as his partner started to read it.
The document was only five pages long, detailing a handful of key changes that I was insisting upon. When I’d gone and looked at their proposal—I’ve got friends at the city planning commission too, so sneaking an early peek hadn’t been hard—there were two major things that bothered the crap out of me about it.
The first was the ground floor—it was currently scheduled to be walled off, with little private yards for the people who paid the most, which would have been fine, except for the fact that walling it off was a great big sign that said go away. So in my document, I stated that the ground floor would instead be mixed use—a combination of shops and restaurants. It was the kind of thing I’d seen a lot of when I was in Europe, and it helped make the distinction between business and shop a little more muddled, and the community a little bit stronger. The contract would dictate there would be at least one restaurant on the ground floor of the building, open to everyone, and serving food at a reasonable price, not pricing out the locals so that the restaurant would fail immediately or be someplace they couldn’t stop in every now and again.
That only took up a couple of pages and was the part I suspected they wouldn’t put up much of a fuss over. It was the remaining three pages I expected them to give me shit over.
With the rest of the document, if they signed to it, they would be guaranteeing one floor of the eight story structure to being permanent low-income apartments, nothing anyone could own, but places that would always be for rent, targeted at struggling families, with fixed rent rates so that they couldn’t just be continually rising until they became too much for anyone to afford. I fully expected it to be the second floor, just above the restaurants and shops I was making them build, which was fine. I had to let the two guys feel like they had some decisions in the matter, and the residents of the apartments would still have full access to any amenities that would be included in the building, such as the built-in gym they had on the existing blueprints. I wanted to ensure that while most of the building could be expensive condominiums, it wasn’t going to be so out of touch with the common people that they lost touch with the community around them.
It was the fact that there would be apartments in the condominium building that I knew might give the two men pause, because it meant they couldn’t as easily just flip and run, which was their usual MO. Sure, they could eventually sell the apartment floor on to some other real estate group, but the contract was transferable as well as being binding for forty years. By the end of that time, the entire neighborhood might have shifted so much as to make it all irrelevant. But anyone they sold it to would still be on the hook for maintaining the fixed income rents, which made it a less likely proposition for them to hand off. What it more likely meant was that the two men would sell all the condos but still be working to manage the apartments themselves.
It meant they couldn’t just walk away, which was what they’d always done.
“In looking at this document, Mister King...” Peterson said. “This... this isn’t us.”
“We don’t do this sort of thing,” Morales added.
“Well, either you’re going to, boys, or I’m not going to sell you this house and the plot of land it’s on,” I laughed, opening my fridge and pulling a beer out. “C’mon, it’s not like I’m really raking you over the coals on this. I’m accepting your offer, as long as it includes that,” I said, gesturing towards the document I’d handed them.
“Couldn’t... couldn’t we just offer you more money?” Morale implored.
“Except it’s not about the money for me. In fact, tell you what. You accept the offer, and I’ll take a cool mil, which is probably a little less than the house is worth,” I said, popping the top off my beer. “You guys have done this a bunch, blown in, bought up land, built a tower then disappeared, moving on to some other opportunity. You need to be aware of how it affects the area around your tower when you do it, and getting you fuckers invested in the neighborhood is the only goddamn way I can think of to get you to do that.” I took a draw off my beer, seeing the puzzled looks on their faces. “Honestly, fellas, it’s for your own good. If you’re gonna keep doing this kind of real estate speculation, you’re going to get your hand caught in the cookie jar from time to time. But I’m letting you off light. Remember, I could’ve made this all disappear just by saying no. All I’m doing is ensuring you don’t fuck up the neighborhood with your plans. You’ll be fine. Trust me.”
The two read the document a number of times, handing it back and forth, before they both signed it, pushing it across the table back to me, as I sat down and signed my half of it, while they pulled out the contract for my house and property out of the suitcase, atop stacks and stacks of bills. I scanned through their contract, and it gave me two weeks to vacate the property, with the demolition of it scheduled for the day after I left. The two were wasting absolutely no time, it seemed, so I guess me throwing a monkey wrench into the works had them very panicked, because they just gave me the one point three mil anyway.
I mean, I guess it was time. Most of the neighbors I liked were moving out in the same time window, and I felt like the place I’d moved into five years ago wasn’t going to be there in a month anyway, regardless of if I stayed or went. Since I was parting ways with Alexandria Indexes, maybe it was time to part ways with Seattle as well. Sure, I had some great friends there—Ken, TJ and his husband David, among a handful of others—but it was also a chapter of my life I could sense was wrapping up.
I will tell you the one thing I decided to definitely do, though, now that I was sitting on a shitload of money—I decided to hire a service to move all my things into storage for me while I looked for a new place. I loaded up my large suitcase with clothes before hand, made sure I had all my chargers tucked in with my laptop, and took Astro to the first decent AirBnB I found within a hundred miles, then I let a bunch of strong guys move all my shit for me.
Oh, I sold off the Bugatti as well.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, because I have to talk about the other things first, because I didn’t actually leave my house for a week’s worth of time. The soonest I could get a reputable moving service to come and get all my shit and haul it away was seven days, which meant I had seven more days to say farewell to my house.
So the day after I sold my house, I went out drinking with Ken, TJ and David to a little speakeasy called The Knee High Stocking Co. We knew they were only open until midnight, so they were intended to be our first stop for the evening, as once I’d announced that I’d likely be moving out of town within a matter of weeks, it turned into a very sudden and very rowdy farewell party.
I’d sort of expected a morbid, dour atmosphere once I told them, but the three amigos were actually optimistic on my behalf, eager to hear what new path my life was going to be taking.
“You’re done here, man,” Ken told me. “You conquered the call center, you conquered the diamond, hell, you’ve conquered the city. There’s nothing left for you here any more. You need a change of scenery.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, “ I think so too, but I just haven’t found where I’m changing to yet.”
“So have an adventure for a while!” TJ laughed, patting me on the shoulder. “David and I have always wished we’d traveled more when we had the opportunity, but these days, it’s not like either of us gets much in the way of time off. I mean, we squirrel a couple of weeks off here and there every year, but we’ve never really had one giant worldwide trip, like we always said we would.”
At around eleven thirty, not long before the place was going to close, we were trying to figure out our next move when a familiar voice entered my head again.
Hey man, sorry to do this to you now, but the boss is ready, and so it’s time. You can take a little bit to make your goodbyes or whatever, but we need to get your boss level in front of you sooner rather than later, so let’s not dawdle, okay?
“Funny timing you have, Harvey,” I remember thinking.
It’s like Steve Martin once said, comedy is a matter of tiMING. TI-ming. Timing!
With Harvey giving me the go code, I suddenly shifted from planning to excuses, telling the guys that it wasn’t going to be goodbye but more of farewell for now, and that for the next year or so, I’d probably be in town a few days each month, making sure Jen wasn’t in over her head, not that I really expected her to be.
We said our farewells and then I walked out onto the street, reaching into my pocket, pulling out my phone, calling an Uber. “Where we headed Harvey?” I thought, and he gave me back an address, a residence atop one of the big skyscrapers downtown.
I walked into the lobby of the building, and the doorman immediately asked me who I was here to see. I told him I had an appointment with someone in the penthouse, and that they should be expecting me, because that’s what Harvey told me to say. The doorman picked up the phone and called upstairs, only to be told that yes, I was expected, and that I should just come right up.
The doorman walked me down the hallway, past several elevators before reaching the last one at the very end, where he swiped a keycard in front of a panel, and the elevator slowly purred downward before the doors open.
“Which floor do I push?” I asked before entering the elevator, noticing there were only two buttons in it—penthouse and lobby.
“You’ll figure it out,” the doorman said with a smile, as the doors closed, leaving me in the elevator, so I pushed the penthouse button and it began to slowly crawl upwards.
Now remember, there’s nothing to be gained from lying. Honesty is literally your only saving grace here. Don’t stop and think about what you’re going to say; just say it. It’s going to be scary, but I’m right here with you, and you’re gonna get through this. I think you’re ready, and that’s all that matters, because I am literally never wrong on these sorts of things, okay? I just need you to trust me and be completely open the minute those doors open. Don’t hide anything. Don’t shut anything down. Go from the heart, and you’re going to do fine.
“Jesus, Harvey, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were nervous,” I said to myself.
No fucking shit I’m nervous. Just because I’ve never been wrong on these sorts of things doesn’t mean there isn’t a first time for everything, and this is a pretty big swing for the fences by me as a final challenge before we get you settled in.
The elevator doors dinged and then opened before me, letting me into a large cavernous entryway, which I realized was sort of the start of a massive apartment. Slightly down the hall, I could hear what sounded like cooking, so I started walking down that way. “Hello?” I called. “I was told to come here?”
“Yes yes, Derrick, come in, come in,” a voice from down the hall said to me. “We’ve been waiting for your arrival with baited breaths.”
‘We?’ I remember thinking.
The floors of the hallways were carved marble, long solid unsplit pieces that must have been an utter bitch to lay up here, but it made the whole place feel more like a temple than an apartment. I almost wondered if I should take my shoes off. I walked down the hallway and found it emptied into a large room that seemed to be partially sectioned off, the left part a kitchen, the middle left a dining area, and the rest of the room a massive living room. The lights were all neon, bright shades of orange, red, pink and gold, like a 1980s sunset glow, except for the kitchen, which had a few white overhead lights to make that area feel less moody, which is where I saw two women.
It’s truly hard to say which I noticed first, because both women caught my eye for extremely different reasons. The woman on the left looked to be about thirty, Mediterranean in descent, with slightly olive skin and charcoal black hair with streaks of dark brown in it, pulled back into a very relaxed ponytail. She was dressed in a white tank top and a tight pair of gym shorts, slowly putting a gyro onto a plate, pushing it towards me, as she already had one in front of her and the other woman also had one in front of her. She was breathtakingly gorgeous.
The other woman was a familiar face I hadn’t seen in years, not in person anyway. For a couple of years, though, I’d shared a bed with her, although really I guess I was only one of many men to sleep in that bed. I knew her mother was Mexican and her father was white, because I’d met both of them, back when she and I had been dating. She had on an oversized Duke University sweatshirt and what looked like yoga pants on beneath it. She had her hair up in a bun, but I suspected if she’d let it down, it would still hang down nearly to her belly button.
Her name was Vanessa.
“Holy shit, Deke,” Vanessa said, trying to give me as much wattage behind her smile as she could, “I didn’t think you’d really come when she told me you would.”
“Vanessa,” I said, trying to keep my voice as flat as I could. “Who’s your friend?”
“Ah, forgive my poor manners, Mister King,” the other woman said, wiping her hands off on a towel next to the stove before moving over towards me, extending it toward me for me to shake. “You can call me Vera.”
“Is this your place, Vera?” I said, shaking her hand, not feeling comfortable enough to do my cheeky little kissing the back of her hand move I usually did. “It’s very nice.”
“It’s one of my many temples scattered around the world,” she said, with a relaxed confidence I’d only seen a couple of times in my lifetime. “Not as many as there used to be, but you know, you have to change and keep up with the times.”
‘Temples?’ I thought to myself.
Tell the boss I said hi, Deke.
‘Wait, what?’
Tell the boss I said hi.
“Harvey says I’m supposed to say hello to you,” I told Vera, as it was all starting to dawn on me what exactly I’d walked into.
“Harvey, hm?” Vera laughed. “I suppose it’s as fitting a name as any other. “I was always fond of Susurri myself.”
That’s Latin for whisper.
“What’s in a name?” I said with a smile, trying to portray I was at ease, when every single danger alarm I had in my head was ringing at full volume. “So, Vera, what am I doing here?”
“Oh, I thought it would be obvious, Derrick,” she said to me. “You’re here for your final test, to see if you’re ready for the love of your life to finally enter it. Come, first we eat and then we’ll move on to the test.”
“Whatever you say, Veritas,” I replied with a little bow.
She clicked her tongue in discouragement. “Now now, no bowing or praying while you’re here. It’ll only confuse your karma. I understand you were out drinking, so I want you to eat some of this wonderful food I’ve prepared, to help your head clear a little bit. The last thing I want is you facing this challenge without your wits entirely about you.”
“And why is she here?” I said, gesturing to Vanessa, who had mostly remained quiet since my arrival.
“She’s here for two reasons, Derrick,” Veritas said, placing her plate and mine on the table in the dining room area where Vanessa had already carried her own plate to, as the three of us sat down. “She’s here because she has a question she desperately needs answered, and she’s here because she’s a final test for you to deal with. Now, no more talking until you’ve finished that gyro in front of you.”
The three of us ate in silence, and to her credit, it was truly divine food, easily the best tasting gyro I’d ever had in my life. My mind was racing with thousands of questions, none of which I felt comfortable enough to ask yet. It was pretty obvious from Vanessa’s face that she also had more than her fair share of questions.
And still, we ate quietly.
Nobody spoke for some time.
After I finished my gyro, I was the first to break the silence. “That was a godly meal,” I said, by way of pun, which brought a smile to Vera’s face.
“I should hope so,” she said, her eyes kind and warm and inviting, like I could just fall into them for a few hours before anyone found me. “I have a lot less followers these days, but that shouldn’t impact my cooking skills anyway. I used to be very good at this and it wouldn’t be wise to lie to me.”
“That’s fair,” I told her. “Now, why am I here, and, more importantly, why is she?” I said, gesturing at Vanessa, whom I still hadn’t directly spoken to yet.
“I’m here because I want to apologize, Derrick,” Vanessa said to me, her voice shaky and cracking. “When we started dating, we were both so young and foolish, thinking we could fuck away all our problems and that the rest would just magically fall into place. And neither of us wanted to make compromises, which is always the biggest problem in any real relationship, never being willing to give the other person what they need, be it space or more closeness or more support.”
I frowned a little bit. “Vanessa, you cheated on me. Lots. Not just once. Not with just one person. Hell, I know of at least two people you cheated on me with, and that’s just the ones I know about. You went on to marry one of them. You’re still married to him, as far as I know. But now that things have started going south with him, you’re jumping ship. Again. Because that’s what you do, Vanessa. You’re a survivor, at the expense of everyone and everything around you. You don’t care about the damage you leave in your wake. You don’t care who you hurt along the way. You’re just in it to make sure you’re safe and taken care of, and now that John’s safety net is gone, you’re moving on to find greener pastures.”
“No, Deke!” Vanessa said, reaching across the table, grabbing onto my arm, clinging to me like a lifeline. “I’m coming back to you because I realize now that I was wrong. I should’ve talked to you about the problems we were having and we could’ve worked through them, like adults are supposed to do. We could have! I could’ve told you how I felt like you were spending too much time in the office and not enough time with me, and we could’ve found some common ground to build things better. I’m sorry I wasn’t a better person, but I was young and stupid. You’re always going on about how everyone deserves a second chance, Deke, but you won’t give me one? You won’t give a second chance to the woman who held your heart for so long?”
She looked at me with those pleading green eyes of hers, a tear starting to form in the corner of one, biting her bottom lip nervously.
I glanced over at Vera, inhaling a deep breath before pushing it back out, carefully. “I can tell that you want to say something to me, so you may as well.”
“You’ve got a choice in front of you, Derrick. If you want, you can choose to accept Vanessa’s offer and give her a second chance. She will be unable to lie to you for a full year, but in that time, you will also be unable to split from her, for any reasons at all. It will be the second chance she says she’s always wanted,” Vera said, holding her glass of wine in her hand, swirling it. “On the other hand, you can choose to decline Vanessa’s offer, and refuse to give her a second chance, and you will never have the opportunity to get an honest answer from her as to how she’s felt about you all of these years. You could be the long lost love of her life, the great white whale she let slip through her grasp, or you could just be another port in a storm, a place for her to find shelter until the calm has returned and she can set out in search of greener pastures. If you refuse her now, you will never get the honest answer to that.”
Vanessa’s fingertips clung to my forearm, squeezing onto it imploringly, her eyes never once leaving my face, even as I refused to look back at her, keeping my eyes on Veritas the entire time, her look giving absolutely nothing away either in Vanessa’s favor or against.
“It’s not a hard choice,” I told Vera, hearing Vanessa exhale a breath of confident satisfaction. “I don’t need you to tell me the truth when it comes to Vanessa, because I learned that lesson all on my own. Whether I’m 99% certain or 100% certain, the answer’s obvious—she may have fooled herself into thinking that she loved me, but she never did, not really.”
Vanessa gasped, and her grasp on my arm grew much tighter, like she could hold on strongly enough to keep me in her clutches. “Derrick!” she whispered to me. “You can’t possibly believe that!”
“After I caught you cheating on me Vanessa, you never apologized for it. You could have. I may have moved out of the apartment, but you knew exactly where I worked, because the new branch you were clinging to, my so-called friend John, worked there too. Instead, you avoided talking to me ever again, which was probably for the best. And over the last several years, even as hurt as I was, I never did anything to get in the way of you and John, nor did I do anything to jeopardize John’s place at the company. Sure, he and I moved to different divisions, but John was trying to oust the founder out of his own company. He fucked it up all by his lonesome. How the fuck did he think that was going to over? Hell, I bet it might have even been your idea, because John never struck me as bold enough to try that kind of shit on his own. You probably talked him into making a play to take over AI.”
“I won’t let you paint me as the bad guy here, Deke!” she said, letting go of my arm, standing up, as she was starting to tear up. “I’m tired of everyone always painting me as the bad guy!” She stood up and stepped away from the table, walking over to the window, folding her arms in front of her, practically hugging herself. “I’m not a bad person!” she shouted at the downtown Seattle night skyline.
“Sooner or later, Vanessa, you’re going to have to account for your actions. Not to me, because I’m so far removed from your life now, I don’t even know who you are anymore, but someone somewhere’s going to collect on your misdeeds. Think about this—John’s been out of work for about a year now, and instead of helping him get back on his feet and figure out what he’s doing with his life, you’re off having expensive dinners with Josef again, as well as being here, trying to convince me to take you back, probably because you heard I came into a load of money, if I’m honest. If you’re not a bad person, Vanessa, then why do you keep doing such bad, bad things?”
She spun around, tears rolling down her cheeks openly now. “You don’t know what it’s like, being a woman in this fucking world! No one’s ever looking out for you and everyone’s trying to take advantage of you! You always have to wonder if the guy buying you drinks at the bar has slipped you something to let him rape you! You always have to wonder if the guy you’re sharing a bed with is going to kick you out of it sooner or later for someone younger or prettier. I haven’t had solid ground to stand on since I was a fucking kid, Deke!”
I shook my head with a quiet laugh. “Welcome to the fucking human race, Vanessa. It’s dangerous, it’s unpredictable and it’s inevitably fatal, but you can’t trust everybody and you can’t distrust everybody either. I literally can’t give you a second chance, because I already did that, way back when. Hell, I gave you more than two chances, but cheating on me, that was the final straw, my bridge too far. There’s no road back from that. You’re out of lifelines with me. I don’t trust you, because you’ve given me loads of reasons not to. So many reasons. Giving you another chance now wouldn’t just be foolish, it’d be downright fucking stupid. So, no, Veritas, I don’t need to definitively know what’s in Vanessa’s heart, because I already know more than enough for my satisfaction. If I’m honest, I should’ve known better before she and I ever got serious, because there were plenty of red flags early on in the relationship, but I guess some lessons have to be learned the hard way.” I glanced over at Vanessa. “And as crazy as it is, I don’t wish you ill will, Vanessa. Genuinely I don’t. I hope you grow out of this paranoid attitude and find someone you let into your heart. I mean it. I truly hope you find a chance at happiness again, but it’s not with me. It never was, and it never will be.”
My man.
Veritas smiled, as if she was both surprised and delighted by my answer. “You are not the man you were when my bracelet first came into your life, Derrick King. You are better, smarter, wiser. You are finally ready for the love of your life to enter it.”
“I mean,” I said with a grin, “you can’t guarantee that this woman you’re going to introduce me to will be the love of my life, but I get that you’re convinced she’s as close as you think you’re going to find. There’s no such thing as perfection in this world, is there, Goddess? And that’s where the beauty truly lies. In all our flaws and mistakes, that’s where we take the true measure of a person. So I hope you’re right, and that she really is the love of my life, but even if she’s half of what you’ve been promising, I think that’ll be more than enough.”
Veritas stood up and moved over to stand next to me, reaching down to touch the bracelet, a motherly expression on her face. “You’ve gotten so much better at this over the centuries, my creation.”
Aw, thanks boss.
“Harvey says thank you,” I told her, uncertain if she could hear him like I could.
“I can hear him, thank you, Deke,” she said, tracing a fingertip along my arm. “This will be the only time we ever meet, because you’re going to have your soulmate soon, but it’s been some time since I’ve had the chance to indulge in pleasures of the flesh. Might I interest you in one last dance before you settle down?”
Oh damn, Deke. You don’t have to say yes, but... I mean... can you?
“Is this still part of the test?” I said to her, awe and maybe even a touch of fear in my eyes.
“No no,” she said, her fingertips drawing up along my bicep. “No more tests, no more games. Harvey, as you call him, has locked in on the perfect candidate for you, and your fate is already determined. Nothing you do now will change that, one way or the other. And, as I said, we’re never going to meet again. But I find myself wanting to enjoy this moment of triumph with you.”
I canted my head over towards Vanessa, who had turned back to looking out the window, directionless and aimless, completely adrift in her own misery and self-pity. “Shouldn’t you send her away, let her head back to John or Josef or whoever it is she’s sharing a bed with now?”
“I shouldn’t tell you this, but she was looking at you as her next safe haven, so let her watch as you get a heavenly lay, as your last great hurrah,” she said, her fingertips brushing along my neck. “Don’t you think she’s got it coming, seeing you being happy with someone else?”
I looked up at Veritas and gave a little shrug. “Honestly? I think she’s suffered enough. Let her go. Don’t make her any more miserable than she already is. There’s no need to be cruel. She’s got plenty of pain in her heart. I don’t want to add to it any more than I already have.”
Veritas brushed her fingertip under my chin, lifting my head to make me look at her. “You’re still full of surprises. There’s not necessarily a need to be cruel, but no one would’ve blamed you if wanted to be, one last time. But you’ve stood your ground and I admire that.” She glanced over at Vanessa. “This is your one and only warning. You can leave now, but if you stay, all you can do is watch. You cannot speak and you cannot interfere. He’s giving you your chance to excuse yourself, so you don’t have to suffer any further ignominy, but if you’re truly glutton for punishment, you’re welcome to stay and abuse yourself at your leisure.”
It was a long moment before Vanessa turned back from the window, then slowly moved over to the table, grabbed her purse from the top of it, and headed down the hallway, not saying another word. The elevator door opened, she stepped into it, and it closed behind her. That was the last I saw of her. I don’t know that I’ll ever see her again, either, but I think that’s fine. That chapter of my life is closed and done with, and it’s all for the better.
Vera offered me her hand as I stood up. I took it and let her lead me around the temple or apartment or whatever it was we were in. We moved down a hallway, turned around a corner and then headed down another hallway, because the place was ridiculously large. In fact, it might have even been bigger on the inside than it was on the outside.
Magic’s crazy.
Eventually we made our way down to a bedroom that looked big enough to fit dozens of people. The bed I found myself looking at was giant enough that if I laid my feet at any edge of the bed and did my best, I still wouldn’t even stretch a third of the way across it. It was covered in expensive Egyptian cotton sheets that had a thread somewhere in the tens of thousands, if I had to guess. And pillows. Jesus, I’d never seen so many fucking pillows in my entire life. It was like the pillows were rabbits and the only reason they’d stopped multiplying was because we’d come into the room and they couldn’t do it while people were watching.
I should probably say that Vera wasn’t the normal type of woman I’m attracted to—I know a lot of people aren’t bothered by the “naturalist” look, and I respect a woman’s decision to groom herself however she wants, but leg and armpit hair are generally sort of a turnoff for me. Vera had both, and yet, it worked for her in a way that it never had for me with any other woman. It wasn’t unruly, and, frankly, my attention was drawn elsewhere as she pulled the tank top up and over her head, revealing a pair of perfectly teardrop shaped breasts exactly at that sweet spot between full and shaped without going over the top. She pushed her shorts down and revealed that while she have preferred the natural look, she still kept her bush trimmed at least, so I wasn’t looking at a savage garden of hair everywhere.
She gestured with her hand to the bed, an eager smile on her face.
I didn’t know what to say, so I quickly undressed as well, getting out of my clothes, setting them on a chair nearby before I finally found my voice again. “You’re the deity here,” I said with a soft laugh. “How do you want to go about this?”
A sly grin spread across her face as she spun me around, my back to the bed, then lifted one of her legs up, up, up, until her foot was level with my sternum, the flexibility very impressive, as she pushed against my chest and shoved me onto my back suddenly.
“Now, I know this is going to be intense,” she said, slowly lowering her leg down and moving over towards the bed. “But if you cum in my mouth, I am going to be extremely disappointed in you. Now be a good boy and enjoy this, but not too much.”
She giggled a little, something very out of character for, well, a goddess, but who am I to tell someone thousands of years old what they can and can’t do? She placed one hand on either side of me on the bed, bending down at the waist, as she just engulfed my cock with her mouth, sliding all the way down until I could feel her lips at the base of my shaft, as her tongue began to explore as much of my dick as she should without moving her mouth.
And she just... she just fucking waited.
For, like, a really, really, really long fucking time.
I could feel her throat quivering a little bit around the tip of my cock, her tongue slathering over different parts of my shaft, but she didn’t pull up and didn’t draw back, and I was starting to get worried that she was going to be choking or in pain before it dawned on me.
She really could do this all damn day.
She didn’t have to breathe.
Once it was clear that I had figured it out, she pulled her head back and off of my prick, looking up at me as she started to giggle again. “The look on your face when you realized I didn’t have to stop if I didn’t want to... that never gets old with you mortals.”
“How many mortal men have you been with?” I asked her. I shouldn’t have asked her, but I knew I wasn’t going to see her again, and I just didn’t have any filter left in me.
“Men?” she asked, her fingertips stroking my dick slowly. “Not as much as you might think. I would say less than the number of presidents this country of yours has had. Women? Probably a similar count, so, all in all, less than a hundred partners over the millennium. And in recent years, the pickings haven’t been to my tastes, so it’s been quite some time.”
“I hope to fit in comfortably into the middle of where they all performed over the years,” I said, as she started to climb on top of me. “And not rank in at the bottom.”
“Oh Derrick,” she purred at me. “I never rank partners. I never compare partners either. Each person is their own unique experience, and you should never measure people sexually against one another. It’s impolite and only makes you overly critical. Was it difficult to hold back your release?”
“I was doing every bit of calculus I remembered in my head, reciting old call center routines, anything I could to counter the impending release,” I told her, laughing, more than a little winded. “You did things with your tongue I didn’t even think were possible.”
“Then believe me when I tell you that it’s okay if your first orgasm arrives quickly,” she said, reaching down to grab my cock, lining it up against the opening of her pussy. “Because you and I, we’re going to be at this all. Fucking. Night.”
Her hips slammed down, splitting her snatch open on my cock, and the sultry, wicked moan that tumbled from her lips was one of the sexiest things I’d ever heard. Her cunt was warm, wet and velvety around my shaft, as she started to bounce and hop, up and down atop me, both of her hands reaching up to cup her own breasts, pinching her nipples as her eyes closed.
“Fuck that’s nice, Derrick,” she moaned down to me. “Push your hips up while I ride you. Fuck me like I’m fucking you. That’s so fucking good, feeling you inside of me. You’re the first man in there since the lightbulb was invented, so you had best leave your mark.”
I knew I was going to do more than that, and soon, but even though she’d given me permission to fire off quickly, I wanted to give it my best, and so I dug my heels down onto the bed, pressed my shoulders and arms along the top of it, and did what I could to snap my hips up and into her as she dropped down onto me, the first collision of our bodies drawing an almost surprised squeal from her lips, as her head whipped forward.
“Yes, Derrick! Yes! Fuck back at me! Fuck me and let me feel you worship at my temple! Let that bitch Aphrodite look on in envy as I show her true lust! Cum for me!”
Even now, having found my perfect love, I can honestly say that my first orgasm of the night with Veritas was the most overwhelming sensation I’ve ever felt in my life, and my soon-to-be wife has told me repeatedly she’s okay with that. I mean, she totally gets it. It wasn’t human; I was communing with a goddess. That orgasm was like my soul being torn from my body, run through the washer, shoving into a dryer, yanked out and then quickly stuffed back inside of my body before it had time to worry. I know that I lost consciousness for like a minute. I would say I blacked out, except that everything went white, and saying I whited out just sounds weird.
I didn’t leave Veritas’s temple until morning, after we’d both had half a dozen orgasms each, and had been forced to stop for a couple of water breaks, and a shower somewhere in the middle as well. I don’t remember the last words I said to her. By morning, everything was hazy. I was definitely still in something of a daze leaving the place, but when I sort of sobered up from being fuck drunk a day or two later, I looked into the address that Harvey had given me, and the apartment I thought I’d been in... didn’t exist—there was a business on that floor, and they’d been there for the better part of a decade.
I never saw Veritas again, but that was okay.
Harvey told me I did good, and that my great reward was coming soon.
I’d won.
Now I just needed to be patient.
So I decided to keep busy.
The movers came and took all my things out of the house, and for the next few weeks, I lived at an AirBnB that had plenty of room. Even though I’d negotiated a great price because of the length of my stay, I decided I wanted to do a little bit of traveling while I thought things over. I wasn’t sure where I wanted to be or what I wanted to do with my life.
I left Astro with David and TJ again, telling them I’d be back for him within a season or so, once I’d figured out where I was going and what I was doing. I’d had a few possible ideas of things I wanted to look into, so I was going to take a two-month long trip, stopping at all sorts of places like Dublin, Berlin, Cairo, Rome, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Melbourne, giving each location a week.
Harvey had promised me that things were going to get into motion soon, and that me being on the go wouldn’t be a problem. He had it all worked out, and I didn’t need to worry about it. When I least expected it, everything would fall into place. And hey, he’d been right so far, so I agreed to trust him on the matter.
Magic knows best.
The first two weeks of my trip went great. Dublin was more of a sightseeing trip than it was anything to do with my plans on what to do next, because literally every time I’d been over to Ireland in the last five years, and I’d been there a bunch, it had been to set up a call center or improve on a call center. Those trips had been consumed by work from dawn til dusk. I’d never seen much of anything of the city or the surrounding area. I had a great time this time around, even meeting up with people who were working at call centers I’d established, but now purely on a social level, insisting that we not talk shop the entire time I was there.
Berlin was a similar story, although I’d never set up any call centers there, so I didn’t really know many people. I found that it didn’t matter that much, though. Despite what I’d always heard, I found the Germans a remarkably warm and inviting people, eager to share a table and swap stories, even when they found out I was an American. As it turned out, their politics around then were nearly as badly fucked as ours were, and they mostly hated it, just like I did.
To get to Cairo, I needed to fly from Berlin back to London and then down to Cairo, simply because it was least crowded flight I could get, and while I was flying first class these days, I liked not being swarmed with other people on the plane, and it meant I was traveling in off hours.
Sadly, and I’ll bet this’ll come as a shocker to you, I was in London Heathrow Airport, waiting for my connection, only to be told the flight had been canceled. Either they hadn’t sold enough tickets to justify the trip, or they didn’t have staff for the flight, or the wing had fallen off the plane, or some other excuse that didn’t really bother me. It was nearly midnight when the flight was canceled, and the airline offered me a complimentary hotel room for the night and a space on the first flight out in the morning, although I told them if I was flying out the next day, they didn’t need to make it the crack of dawn, and I’d much rather fly around lunchtime instead. They assured me it was fine, and they would make it work.
“We’ll see you tomorrow, Mister King, and thank you for being so accommodating,” the woman at the counter said to me. Same song, different verse, am I right?
I headed over to the hotel, the same hotel that I’d been waylaid in a year and a half ago, when this whole adventure had started, although it was someone different behind the counter. I could swear I smelled Brenda’s perfume in the air, though. I checked into the hotel, placed an order for room service to bring me up a club sandwich with no tomato, some fries and a Coke up as a late-night dinner, then headed up to my room.
“Some times you have to travel a long way to end up right back where you started, huh, Harvey?” I said out loud.
In more ways than you know, boss.
“Wait, what?”
In just a few minutes, there’s going to be a knock at that door, and you and I are going to part ways. I mean, a day or two later, after I make sure I’ve got it right, but we’re at the end of the line here, the last stop on the road, the final leg of our journey, and I just want to say, thanks for not being an asshole. It means a lot to me that you didn’t try and be a dick when you were offered basically unlimited power, and I hope you’ll give me to someone else who’s got a similar mindset, who’s not a complete jackass. I’ve had a lot of owners over my existence, but I think I liked you best. So cheers.
“Aw, Harvey,” I said, trying not to tear up. I was gonna miss him, as weird and chaotic as he’d made my life over the past eighteen months. “I’m gonna miss you too. And I promise not to put you in the hands of someone who doesn’t deserve you.”
Just then, there was a knock at the door...