Chapter 9 - Simon
My phone starts ringing before the sun rises, waking me from a good dream. I groan, rolling over, still half asleep, and reach for it. I have more of a goal of shutting it up than of answering it. Squinting as my eyes adjust to the rude awakening, I see Bardil’s name across the screen. Dammit. I have to answer.
“What?” I snap, never one for enjoying being woken up before I’m ready. Even if I do get up early, this is too early.
“Morning, did I wake you?” Bardil says, out of breath.
“Are you fucking running? It’s not even five yet,” I grumble, glancing at my watch.
“The wife prefers to run in the morning, so we’re out on a jog.”
“Ok, sounds fucking great. What do you want?” I sigh, sitting up and throwing my legs over the side of the bed because I’m never going to manage to get back to sleep anyway. I guess today will be an earlier start than usual.
“I heard something, and I’m not going to lie, it was a shock,” Bardil says testily.
“Spit it out, man, I haven’t had my coffee yet.”
“Are you married, Simon?”
The question wakes me up fully.
“Uh…”
“Have you been hiding a secret wife from the family?” I hear Nikita laughing in the background.
“Is she listening?” I huff.
“You know Nikita and I have no secrets, man. Just spit it out. Have you got a secret wife or not? You’ve been very quiet lately,” he says.
I sigh heavily. “How did you find out?”
“You set up an entire company just to hire her. It’s hard to keep that a secret when you used family resources and hired her under her married name,” he chuckles.
Rubbing my hand over my face, I groan loudly.
“Any other secrets we should know about?” Bardil teases.
Yeah, one. I’m trying to exact revenge against Jaco Marcas.
“No, and I wasn’t exactly ready for you to find out about her yet,” I mutter.
“Ok, we know we have, so we want to meet her. Family dinner on Friday. Seven at Marlen’s place.”
“Marlen knows?” I groan.
“Come on, man, everyone knows. You think we weren’t going to place bets on whether or not it’s true?” he chuckles.
“I don’t think we’re ready for a family dinner yet, though. You guys are a lot to handle and she…”
“Dude, what are you hiding? Is she someone you shouldn’t be with? Is this going to piss Marlen off?”
Grumbling to myself, I realize that if I don’t agree to the family dinner, Bardil is going to get more suspicious and start investigating me. He might find out about my revenge plan, and I have taken extreme measures to keep my family out of that whole project in order to keep them safe from my personal shit. Dinner it is. Unfortunately.
“Fine,” I growl. “Friday. Seven. Marlen’s place,” I snap.
“Can’t wait to meet her!” Nikita shouts.
“Dude, I can’t believe you kept me on speaker this whole time,” I moan.
